A field approach to the study of civil rights protest participation of southern Negro students

Typescript.Bibliography: leaves [97]-102.ix, 125 l tablesThis dissertation is a secondary analysis of Southern Negro student participation in the civil rights movement. The field approach used is one that is interlevel and views behavior as a function of both Individual and Environment influences. The Individual level is operationalized by student background characteristics, attitudes and behavior and Environment is operationalized by county aggregate data. The sample of 264 Negro students and 998 Southern counties was collected by Matthew and Prothro for their study on political behavior in the South. Some of the major questions asked are: what are the major dimensions of counties and of students? what are the various types of counties and students? and finally, haw useful is an interlevel field theory in explaining protest behavior? Seven orthogonal factors delineated in the student sample are: Protest Politics, Moderate Integration, Electoral Politics, Isolation, Respect for Leaders, Older, and Conservative-cynical. From these dimensions eight groups or types were delineated and labeled. Using the same procedure on county data six dimensions were delineated: Cosmopolitan, Mixed Income, Negro Poor, Stable, Good Economy, and Negro Rural; and three groups or environments: Poor Urban, Parochial Rural Negro and Stable County types. Students and counties, i. e., the Individual and Environment levels, were related to each other through various techniques of analysis. One cross-tabulation of student types and county types showed that 47% of the Protest types were found in Stable County type, a county described as similar to a suburb close to a major city, with a large percentage affluent educated families. Student data, particularly protest behavior, was very good in discriminating between groups based on county types as shown in various discriminant function analyses. A series of regression analyses tried to compare the proportion of variance explained using only Individual data, using only Environment data, and using both Individual and Environment data. The dimension "Protest Approval" by parents, faculty and administrators proved to contribute most to the variance explained, leading this researcher to see the importance and possible utility of this dimension as an operationalization of the field concept of Environment. The relationships between the Individual level and Environment level were found to be relatively strong and meaningful, particularly in the contingency analysis and discriminant function analysis and also but to a more limited degree in predicting to Protest Behavior