Cole , David L . ; Cole , Shirley TITLE locus of Control in Mexican Students : The Case of the Missing

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH, EDUCATION WELFARE NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF EDUCATION THIS DOCUMENT HAS BEEN REPRO DUCED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED FROM THE PERSON OR ORGANIZATION ORIGIN ATING IT POINTS OF VIEW OR OPINIONS STATED DO NOT NECESSARILY REPRE SENT OFFICIAL NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF EDUCATION POSITION OR POLICY This study investigated the extent to which a stereotype of Mexicans or Chicanos as fatalistic is supported by their locus of control scores. Original data for the paper came from locus of control scores on college students in four nations (U.S.A., Mexico, Ireland, and West,Germany) and from Anglo and Chicano high school students in southern California. These data show the Mexican business administration students to be more internally oriented than is true for students from each of the other nations. Chicano high school students planning to enter college are also internally oriented, and'match Anglo high school studentsalso planning to attend college. Only Chicano male high school students not planning to enter college showed any tendency toward a more external locus of control. The authors also look at locus of control data collected by Garza (1974) and by Reitz and Groff (1973) and find that these also fail to portray either Chicano university students, or Mexican factory workers as fatalistic in outlook. The paper concludes that to the extent that a perceived external locus of control would be indicative of a fatalistic outlook, such perception is lacking in most dataon Mexican or Chicano subjects. (1) presented at Rocky Mountain Psychological Association, Phoenix, Arizona, May 1976. Locus of Control in Mexican Students: The Case of the Missing Fatali t (1) David L. Cole, Occidental College Shirley Cole, University of Arizona A serious problem for cross-cultural research is that of obtaining reasonable equivalence of subjects across cultures. It is difficult to argue that even persons occupying seemingly similar positions in two different societies can, in fact, justifiable be defended as "matched" on psychologically meaningful variables. The frequent use of students from different countries may overlook the possibility that societal prerequisites to student status may be quite different from one country to another, or that the implications college education has for a graduate may be different across nations. An appropriate attempt at meeting the problem just outlined is to seek to define the subject populations from society to society rather carefully and narrowly. While this, of course, makes cross-cultural comparisons more legitimate, it casts into greater doubt the issue as to whether the results obtained within a particular culture afford any sort of basis for generalization across that culture. The present study began as an attempt to compare locus of control scores across four national groups, by obtaining groups of students from each nation who were matched more precisely as to area of study, content of curriculum, and subsequent career expectations than is the case with the more general classification of "student" which is often used. The possibility of evaluating our data in terms of its breadth or narrowness of application within two of the nations used became possible when data appeared from other segments of those nations, during the period when our (1) Presented at Rocky Mountain Psychological Association, Phoenix, Arizona, May 1976.