Word: macke
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Surveys since have echoed these initial findings. In 1982, at a "Day of Dialogue" sponsored by Educators for Social Responsibility, thousands of questionnaires similar to the Mack-Beardslee questioning were distributed to high school students. In the same year, a Newton North High School senior received responses from 950 of his schoolmates on a similar questionnaire. More than 700 students in Akron, Ohio filled in questionnaires on the subject distributed by a city physician. And a California pediatrician administered a survey to nearly 1000 junior and high school students, "embedding" the nuclear war question among 20 items in an effort...
Researchers like Mack stress the need for more study of the issue, but all these surveys and a number of others have given rise to some preliminary conclusions. While they're not sure to what extent or how much it is affecting children, they say the threat of nuclear war has got them worried, and, as Mack testified before a congressional committee in 1983, this worry "has increased in the period 1975-83, as the nuclear arms competition has appeared to become increasingly out of control...
This was the question posed this summer by Harvard's Dr. Robert E. Coles when, in an address to scientists at Los Alamos, he questioned the terror his colleagues say children are supposed to feel because of the nuclear age. Other investigators too have questioned the findings of Mack and his colleagues; at the same congressional hearing during which Mack was raising his fears, a Tufts researcher ridiculed the the importance implicity placed on the nuclear quesetion to the exclusion of other childhood worries. But certainly no psychiatrist as prominent as Coles had yet broken to publicly with the concensus...
Curiously enough, the first people to agree with Coles, at least in one sense, are the very psychiatrists he is seeking to discredit. Mack and Beardsice go to pains in discussing their work, to stress it inherent limitations and the potential for "researcher bias;" they point out in the Yale journal: "The questionnaire format did not allow definite answers to many of the questions to which one would want to have answers, such as the relative importance of this issue for young people in comparision with other social and technological problems, or the variation in thinking among young people from...
...attacking opposing views--Impute the worst motives to those who somehow don't see the light. But what the psychiatrists are doing is more dangerous: they want to impute psychological deficiency to those in the dark about the nuclear peril. In an article on their nuclear task force work, Mack and Beardslee in effect generalize this psychological deficiency as a cultural trait of the U.S. populace: "The fact that there is so little information available about how young people feel about nuclear issues that effect their lives so vitally suggests that we adults have entered into a kind of compact...