Alienation and Integration of Student Intellectuals

Abstract

related to religious orthodoxy among Protestants. Bell,42 using the same scale but controlling for socio-economic status, found no correlation between anomie and being Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish; nor with frequency of attendance at church. It may be speculated that a Normlessness scale clearly differentiating the Purposelessness and Conflict of Directives sub-types might prove more fruitful. Further investigations should be made in regard to the syndrome of Alienation. In this connection, it may be noted that Srole's scale could not be retained in our Alienation scales because his items failed to meet our judging and item analysis criteria. His anomie scale, however, correlated .31 with our Normlessness sub-scale on a college pretest sample of 73. The fact that Nettler's scale 43 also correlated with Srole's scale at about the same magnitude seems to indicate that estrangement from society may be empirically separable from the other components. Finally, while most of the literature and our particular research have conceptualized Alienation as a phenomenon of Society, others,44 have made the local community or associational activities the referent. Perhaps the individual's identification with, or Alienation from, Society, is experienced with reference to primary groups or voluntary associations. It may very well be that Alienation is not a unitary phenomenon, but a syndrome. In this respect, Davids' conceptualization of eight components seems challenging.45 In any case, certainly much more research is required before the Alienation concept can be empirically validated.