The twentieth century has been an era of rapid, world-wide industrialization. Very little is known about the psychological impact of this process, and traditional assessment methods which universalize Western values are largely inappropriate. A prime example of universalizing Western characteristics is Inkeles' and Smith's popular Modernity Scales (1974, 1983), which are designed on the premise that modernity corresponds to good psychological health. This led to choosing inappropriate indicators of what modernity is in developing countries. The Modernity Scales exemplify many of the fundamental weaknesses of objectivistic assessment strategies in intercultural research. Perhaps a qualitatively-rooted life-history model which would entail multiple life-history interviews is in order. An illustration of this life-history method was published by Bustamente in 1983. It told of a 20-year-old woman who migrated to Tijuana at age 17 to work in a maquiladora factory. The major conflicting discourses or roles in this woman's life were discussed on the assumption that these contradictions are the expressions of conflicting social pressures in her life. As a guide to this analysis, one can assess the fulfillment of basic human needs or powers. Six needs or powers are described by Bulhan in his "Critical Psychology of Liberation" (1985): biological needs; rootedness; integrity, and self-clarity; symbolic immortality; self-reproduction through praxis; and maximum self-determination. The point of this method is not to concentrate solely on an individual account but to collect a number of such accounts, and to analyse them as though they were a set of Thematic Apperception Test responses. (BZ)