The research on which this book is based began as a study of problems in a public housing project, Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis, and ended as a study of the dynamics of socioeconomic inquiry. The original principal investigators were concerned with what could be learned about the people in the project to assist governmental agencies. As the study developed, the principal policy concerns shifted toward questions involving the changes in the socioeconomic system that would be necessary to eliminate the kinds of inequality from which the residents of Pruitt-Igoe suffer. These shifts mirror the basic change during the 1960's in the focus of social diagnosis. In the research process itself, this meant that instead of addressing the subjects of research primarily as tenants in a public housing project, researchers came to be interested in them as lower-class black people, and even more generally as representative members of the American underclass, a group of many hues. Most of the data was collected roughly from the summer of 1963 through 1966. The questions treated here concern the kinds of interpersonal relationships that develop in nuclear families, the socialization processes operating in families in a slum environment, the informal relationships of children and adolescents with each other, and, finally, the world views arising from the life existences of the Pruitt-Igoeans and the ways they make use of this framework to order their experiences and make sense out of them. (Author/JM)