Margaret Mead's Research In Samoan Culture

Although Mead’s research in Samoa came with a lot of controversy and criticism, it did shed some light into why American adolescent face great emotional and psychological stress. Margaret Mead, an American anthropologist, wrote the book Coming of Age in Samoa. It outlines her research of the sexual lives of the youth on the island of Ta’u in Samoan Islands. Mead believes that adolescents in America face many problems in society and sought to find if all cultures experienced this. She set out to find whether nature or nurture played a role in these problems. Her research was conducted over a period of nine months in which she tried to immerse herself in the culture as much as she could because she wanted to get as much raw information as possible. Her research was intended to improve the lives of adolescents in America, by reducing the stress they go through throughout their lives. Mead began with describing a typical day in the life of Samoa people. She describes …show more content…
He claimed that Samoan culture is much different than Mead portrayed. He suggested that men were very aggressive, premarital sex was looked down upon, and rape was a common thing in this culture. Freeman believes that the Samoan girls that Mead interviewed lied to her, in order to impress her. Freeman’s views and research on Samoan culture were not correct. When he conducted his research in Samoa, the woman had grown old and converted to Christianity. As Paul Shankman said, when Freeman interviewed the women in Samoa, their memories where inaccurate and inconsistent on several major points. (Shankman, 2013, pg. 60) But his results also supported Mead to some extent. He found that 20-40% of teens aged 15 to 17 had engaged in premarital sex. (Freeman, 1983, 238-240) Although this is not as much as Mead had stated there was, it does prove that her research wasn’t all incorrect. Perhaps Freeman wasn’t a enthusiast of Mead, and wanted her work to be wrong all