Children's Readers: A Cross-Cultural Selection, 1961

Children's readers from across the world were collected in the early 1960s when the researcher was working on a larger study, resulting in the book The Achieving Society, an investigation of the relationship between need for achievement and entrepreneurial behavior among businessmen of several cultures. The readers were included to examine how the achievement, affiliation, and power motivation are transmitted through socialization to the members of a culture. Stories were collected from two time periods: around 1925 and around 1950. Twenty-three countries were represented in the collection of stories from around 1925 (Group I) and 40 countries were represented in the collection from around 1950 (Group II). Twenty-one stories from each country were selected, each time. The United States was included in each collection. In the translations of the stories into English, all children's names, place names, national leaders, etc. were standardized for scoring purposes so that countries would not be identifiable. For example, all girls were called Mary and Jane, and all towns were called Big Town and Little Town. An additional sample of American data from 1790 to 1960, including readers, hymns, and fiction, was also collected. The original, untranslated readers are available through the archive of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The Murray Research Archive has copies of the translated stories, organized by country, and coding information to identify the origin and date of each story. The stories were scored for need for achievement, affiliation, and power. These scores are available as well as the American readers, hymns, and fiction.