During the two-year period that I have been writing this book, I have also been carrying on a research study of a particular aspect of the influence of a mass society on adolescence. The book and the study are quite separate undertakings. The study is, of course, limited in scope to certain manifestations of the social processes with which the book is concerned. But the observations, formal and informal, that I have had to make in the course of the research have been essential to the book, both as data to be reported and, equally, as a realistic discipline to my conceptions of just how these processes take place in the social institution the secondary school to which nearly all adolescence in our society are consigned.