The Margins of Society (MOS) scale comprises 7 items. Respondents were asked to indicate the extent of their agreement with each item on a five-point scale varying from strongly agree to strongly disagree. For ease of presentation responses have been collapsed into "agree" and "disagree" categories. Table 1 presents a summary of the responses to each item. It is clear that "anomic" responses are given by only a minority of the sample. Less than one in ten feel that their whole world is falling apart; slightly more report feeling that it doesn't matter how hard in life people try, it doesn't make any difference, and that they wish they were someone important. Slightly more again, but still no more than around 15 per cent of the group report feeling discriminated against and all alone these days. Finally, somewhat less than a third indicated that they did not like to live by society's rules.
Aggregate scores on the scale were obtained by summing the scores on each item (ratings ranged from 1 to 5) and dividing the total by 7, the number of items in the scale. The distribution of scores are shown in Figure 5. Scores range from a low level of reported anomie, a score of 1, to a high level, a score of 4.14 with a mean of 1.95 and a median of 2. Clearly, high levels of anomie are found in only a small proportion of the total sample. Table 2 provides a distribution of the MOS scale collapsed into quintiles.
While it is clear that anomie is not widespread among the sample of residents surveyed in the South East Queensland region, it is also clear that relatively high levels of anomie do exist among a minority.
These findings are instructive. They indicate that high levels of anomie are likely to be present when key social relationships in both work and family situations are disrupted by unemployment in the first instance and divorce, separation or widowhood in the second. The relatively high levels of anomie found among the young and the single may be due to the fact that stable social relationships have not yet been formed. It is apparent that this data needs further examination by multivariate procedures. There are clearly relationships between age and marital status and very probably between age and employment status. The employment of multivariate procedures would enable the independent effects of these factors on anomie to be systematically evaluated. Nevertheless, it is already clear that in the context of the development of an early warning system the confluence of youth and unemployment as a precussor to the development of subjective forms of anomie should not be ignored.
The effects of the post modernizing forces of globalization, urban transformation and mass migration on subjective anomie have yet to be determined. Further analysis of the survey data currently under way is concerned with these questions.