Recommendations or prescriptions must be simple, understandable and easy to implement in daily life by most patients. In the Appendix, we provide a leaflet as a guide for education and counselling in the field of hyperkalaemia for patients and professionals. In our experience the use of educational tools such as brochures with food images and inserts with “traffic light” colors can be useful during counselling to summarize some essential aspects of nutritional therapy and to help patients remember instructions. Several foods within the various food groups have been color-coded. The color green identifies foods that can be safely consumed even in hyperkalaemia, orange means foods that can be consumed with caution in hyperkalaemia, while in red are foods that should be avoided in hyperkalaemic patients if possible. This results in 3 columns, which allow users to build 3 kinds of diets characterized by mild, moderate or severe potassium restriction , recommended in the case of mild, moderate or severe chronic hyperkalaemia, respectively . In addition, we also provide several pragmatic suggestions meant to facilitate the application of potassium restricted diets in daily life . Obviously this tool, such as any other visual and practical tool, can only help in achieving excellent results if it is used within nutritional education programs appropriately applied by skilled and well trained health professionals who adapt the nutritional intervention to the individual patient. As we described above, the leaflets report a selection of foods from various food groups. It is possible that some foods are missing but boxes can be filled with other foods as needed,plastic potting pots to adapt the tool to patients’ habits, culture, traditions and needs. It is a great honor to receive the 2014 Cooley-Mead Award.
I feel especially honored when I review the names of those who have received this award in past years. Three are former Harvard teachers and colleagues of mine——Fred Bales, Alex Inkeles, and George Homans; many are old friends whose work I have long admired——Larry Bobo, Bernie Cohen, Gary Fine, Hal Kelley, Jane Piliavin, and Sheldon Stryker. The first Cooley-Mead Award was given to Muzafer Sherif in 1979. Had the award’s inception been two decades earlier, I am confident that Samuel Stouffer , a mentor and role model for me, would have also been a recipient. He was elected president of the American Association of Public Opinion Research in 1952 and the American Sociological Association in 1953. And he is certainly one of the truly great and influential social psychologists in sociology’s history. His generation followed that of Charles Horton Cooley , George Herbert Mead , W. I. Thomas , and other founders of American sociology in the early development of social psychology. Together with Paul Lazarsfeld and Rensis Likert, Stouffer developed the probability survey into a refined research instrument for all the social sciences. He was also the vital leader of three of the major social science projects of the mid-twentieth- century: Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma, for which Stouffer kept the study going when Myrdal returned to Sweden when his nation was threatened by Germany’s Wehrmacht; The American Soldier series ,which Stouffer organized and directed on Army morale throughout World War II; and the survey study of McCarthyism published at the height of that dark period in American political history. This third book, Communism, Conformity and Civil Liberties , although six decades old, remains a model of how to analyze large-scale survey data and how to write about it simply and succinctly. Stouffer’s political courage was involved in this last work that undercut Senator Joseph McCarthy’s claim that the nation was highly concerned about Communists in government. In 1952, The FBI.’s J. Edgar Hoover received notice from a secret Harvard informant who claimed that, of all people, “Professor Talcott Parsons was probably the leader of an inner group” of Communist sympathizers at Harvard!
The informant alleged that the new Department of Social Relations had turned into a dangerous left-wing center as a result of “Parsons’ manipulations and machinations.” Based on this dubious “evidence,” Hoover authorized the Boston FBI. to initiate a security investigation of Parsons. Because he knew such suspected “Communists” as Parsons, Stouffer was then denied access to classified documents. Infuriated, Parsons in turn immediately prepared an affidavit in defense of Stouffer. “This allegation is so preposterous,” Parsons wrote, “that I cannot understand how any reasonable person could come to the conclusion that I was a member of the Communist Party or ever had been.” To Stouffer, he wrote, “I will fight for you against this evil with everything there is in me: I am in it with you to the death.” Stouffer soon responded. The Republican Methodist from small-town Iowa not only wrote Communism, Conformity and Civil Liberties soon after this episode, but he also successfully faced off a McCarthyist inquisition held in Boston. He arranged for his former doctoral students who were Roman Catholic nuns and priests, replete in their habits and collars, to sit ostentatiously behind him at the hearing. That proved too much for the nominally Catholic McCarthy; he abruptly ended the session. Stouffer’s many key contributions are not remembered today as fully as they deserve. So I devote this paper to recalling his life and achievements and to one of his most lasting social psychological conceptual contributions—relative deprivation. Stouffer was born and grew up in the small town of Sac City in western Iowa. In 1900, the year of his birth, Sac City boasted only 2,079 people, and today it has virtually the same population. His father was the publisher of the local newspaper, and he initially planned to join him in journalism. He majored in English at the tiny Methodist college, Morningside, just sixty miles to the west in Sioux City. Upon graduation, he set off for Harvard University where he earned his masters degree in English before returning to his father’s newspaper. His path to sociology began with a chance meeting that he once described to me in detail. One summer in the 1920s, he took his family to the Wisconsin lake country for a vacation. Restless and sociable as always, Stouffer quickly made acquaintance with other vacationers staying at nearby cabins. One of these neighbors was Edward Ross, the famous University of Wisconsin sociologist who at the time was one of the most cited writers in the discipline . Ross responded by giving him a copy of his then-popular social psychology textbook . Stouffer read it voraciously, became fascinated with social science, and wanted to know how one became a sociologist. Ross encouraged him to apply to a PhDprogram in the subject. With characteristic decisiveness, Stouffer soon applied to the University of Chicago’s sociology department. He was accepted, but to pay for his training he had to work long hours at the Chicago Tribune as a reporter.
Years later, he would attribute his writing style more to the Tribune than to the formal style of academia. “I’ll never be thought of as a great sociologist,” he liked to joke, “I’m not a theorist and everyone can understand every damn word I write!” Stouffer studied at Chicago with two leading American pioneers in quantitative techniques for social science——William Ogburn in sociology and Lewis Thurstone in psychology. After receiving his PhD in 1930, he went to the University of London to learn more about the rapidly developing field of statistics. There he spent a postdoctoral year with R. A. Fisher and Karl Pearson——world leaders in statistics. Ogburn and Fisher in particular greatly influenced him,raspberry container growing and he often mentioned them in lectures and seminar discussions. His rigorous body of work consistently reflects the training he received from these teachers. His important statistical contributions include the Htechnique for making Guttman cumulative scales practical , and Stouffer’s Z, a straightforward method for combining probabilities . Stouffer’s remarkable energy and single-minded devotion to his research are legendary. I could tell dozens of stories of his exploits, but I will restrict myself to a few revealing anecdotes. In 1948, national political surveys were put in bad repute by predicting that Harry Truman would lose the presidential election to Thomas Dewey. Fred Mosteller, the statistician, loved to tell the story of this survey debacle. He wondered how Stoufferwould react, but he should have known. Early the next morning, he saw Stouffer plowing at top speed across Harvard Yard to Emerson Hall, fired up to begin a major study as to why the surveys had gone wrong. Stouffer was a heavy cigarette smoker. But, consistent with his intense style, he was extremely careless about his cigarette ashes. He regularly allowed the ashes to drop without noticing them. As might be expected, this habit had unfortunate consequences. At regular intervals, small paper fires would spring up from ashes falling on his desk while he worked preoccupied as ever. Usually, he took these incidents in stride. He would pop out from his office and calmly ask his frightened secretary to hand him the fire extinguisher. But once I witnessed a different reaction. He sprang from his office with uncharacteristic alarm as smoke poured out. What made the difference this time was that it was his annual tax returns that were going up in smoke! In the fall of 1957, I returned to Harvard as an assistant professor of social psychology in Harvard’s then-titled Social Relations Department. I audited Stouffer’s famous survey analysis graduate seminar. In September 1957, the racial desegregation crisis at Little Rock, Arkansas’s Central High School burst forth on the very same day the seminar held its first meeting. Stouffer rushed excitedly into the seminar room. He looked around the room at the students waiting for the seminar to begin. “Campbell,” he muttered, “and you, Pettigrew—you are the two Southerners around here. I want you to leave right away for Little Rock and study what is going on down there!” The late Ernest Campbell, later of Vanderbilt University, was a visiting scholar at Harvard for the 1957–1958 academic year. We had never met, but we were the only two native Southerners within Stouffer’snear reach. He wanted us to leave on a plane that night; but we persuaded him that our wives might need to know where we were going and what we were doing. However, we did leave on a plane two days later. Wild as it may sound, there was a point to this hurried approach to field research. Like the good newspaperman he started out to be, Stouffer wanted to strike while the iron was hot. He strongly believed in gathering field data while events were unfolding, not months later after sharpening and leveling of people’s memories had taken place. His initial guidance was to start by interviewing a group in Little Rock that was caught in cross-pressures. Such a group, he assured us, would lay bare the underlying dynamics of both sides of the conflict. Ernie and I decided that the white ministers of modern Protestant denominations represented the ideal target group. Most of these men were racially far more liberal and open to school integration than their congregations. However, a major problem arose from the fact that promotions in the ministerial profession are heavily influenced by how successfully one raises money and enlarges the flock. And these critical resources were under the control of their conservative congregations. As our later publications detailed , these cross-pressures did indeed lead to intense situations in which the ministers often had to choose between their beliefs and their careers. Stouffer did not want us to have all the fun. He soon joined us for a few days to see how we were doing. When we told him what we had learned thus far, he took a special interest in the fundamentalist Protestant ministers. These men were not at all in conflict. They preached against racial integration at every opportunity to the delight of their pro-segregationist congregations. They held racial segregation to be ordained by God. Their popular actions drew members away from some of the modern denominations, which further heightened the pressures on the liberal ministers. Given his special interest, we took Stouffer to a Sunday evening service at a small church led by one of Little Rock’s most fervent segregationist ministers. Stouffer soon made it obvious that he was far more comfortable in this setting than we were.