The next study was carried out in Torino, Italy, by my friend and colleague at the NIMH Len Pearlin, at about the same time as the latter two of the four studies that we were conducting in Washington, DC. Len was eager to test the generality of my principal finding in Washington – that social stratification was closely related to parental valuation of self-direction or conformity to external authority – by studying the same phenomenon in a contrasting city. He chose Torino because it was a city of the same size, but of a different culture, with a more radical working-class tradition. I was tremendously excited by his proposal, and agreed to go along, in a secondary position, collaborating with him on the replication of what I had done in Washington and some important extensions thereof.

This study was important to me for three principal reasons. The first, of course, was that I was eager to see whether my findings were the result, one way or another, of Washington being so atypical a city, based as it is on employment in the national legislature and its attendant modes of employment. Turin provided a good test, for in Turin were located major businesses involving advanced technologies. A second reason was that it was our very first attempt at cross-national research, to test whether US findings were true as well for other cultures, and it was a very exciting beginning. The third reason why it was so important was that we learned so much from it.

An anecdote gives some sense of why our initial experience of cross-national research was so eye-opening to us. By sheer luck, we had inherited a wonderful group of bilingual interviewers trained by an American friend. At our first meeting, the ladies informed us that the study was an American import and didn't make any sense to Italians. I jumped in to ask for an explanation. One of the ladies gave me an example that even to my limited knowledge of Italian sounded awful. As it turned out, the Italian language, like many European languages, is really two languages in one: A formal, literary language spoken only by the elite, and a common language spoken by everyone else.