A PARTIAL ANALYSIS OF STUDENT REACTIONS TO PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT'S DEATH*.

The article cites a study which presents a partial analysis of student reaction to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's death. The written reactions of undergraduate sociology students to President Roosevelt's death, produced en lieu of a regular class meeting on the day following the death are evaluated. Evaluation of their attitudes toward the late president took the form of an arrow whose position along a continuum ranging from very negative to very positive symbolized the position of the writer's attitude. Only a minor portion of their contents met two conditions, those of, first relevance, and second, tabulatability without, or with a checkable amount of, interpretation. The portions or aspects which were found to meet these two conditions were distribution of documents along the negative-neutral-positive continuum, length of documents, time, place and source of news of the death of President Roosevelt and distribution of designations of the deceased and of the new president. The criterion of relevance was envisaged on a mere commonsense level.