Group staffing levels and responses to prospective and new group members.

A group's stating level can play an important role in its socialization practices. For example, a group that is understaffed should be more open than an overstaffed group to both prospective and new members. To test this prediction, the leaders of nearly 100 student groups on a college campus were interviewed. These interviews yielded qualitative and quantitative data about the stating levels in the groups and the methods that they used for recruiting prospective members and assimilating new ones. Analyses of the qualitative data clarified issues such as when understating and overstating are likely to occur, what kinds of problems they produce in groups, and how groups try to solve those problems