The book details the sexual life of teenagers in Samoan society in the early 20th century, and theorizes that culture has a leading influence on psychosexual development.

Since its first publication, Coming of Age in Samoa was the most widely read book in the field of anthropology until Napoleon Chagnon's Yanomamö: The Fierce People overtook it.

It is a key text in the nature versus nurture debate, as well as in discussions on issues relating to family, adolescence, gender, social norms, and attitudes.

[3] However, several members of the anthropology community have rejected Freeman's criticism, accusing him of cherry picking his data, and misrepresenting both Mead's research and the interviews that he conducted.

"[11]Boas went on to point out that, at the time of publication, many Americans had begun to discuss the problems faced by young people (particularly women) as they pass through adolescence as "unavoidable periods of adjustment".

She found a village of 600 people on the island of Ta'ū, in which, over a period of between six and nine months, she got to know, lived with, observed, and interviewed (having learnt some Samoan) 68 young women between the ages of 9 and 20.

This also translates into significantly more responsibility being put on men than women: "a man who commits adultery with a chief's wife was beaten and banished, sometime even drowned by the outraged community, but the woman was only cast out by her husband".

"[13]: 122–195 Mead concluded that the passage from childhood to adulthood (adolescence) in Samoa was a smooth transition and not marked by the emotional or psychological distress, anxiety, or confusion seen in the United States.

Mead concluded that this was due to the Samoan girl's belonging to a stable, monocultural society, surrounded by role models, and where nothing concerning the basic human facts of copulation, birth, bodily functions, or death, was hidden.

Mead commented, somewhat satirically:... [an American] girl's father may be a Presbyterian, an imperialist, a vegetarian, a teetotaller, with a strong literary preference for Edmund Burke, a believer in the open shop and a high tariff, who believes that women's place is in the home, that young girls should wear corsets, not roll their stockings, not smoke, nor go riding with young men in the evening.

But her mother's father may be a Low Episcopalian, a believer in high living, a strong advocate of States' Rights and the Monroe Doctrine, who reads Rabelais, likes to go to musical shows and horse races.

Her aunt is an agnostic, an ardent advocate of women's rights, an internationalist who rests all her hopes on Esperanto, is devoted to Bernard Shaw, and spends her spare time in campaigns of anti-vivisection.

Although subsequent reviews of her work have revealed faults by the standards of modern anthropology, at the time the book was published the idea of living with native people was fairly ground breaking.

The use of cross-cultural comparison to highlight issues within Western society was highly influential and contributed greatly to the heightened awareness of anthropology and ethnographic study in the United States.

Many American readers felt shocked by her observation that young Samoan women deferred marriage for many years while enjoying casual sex before eventually choosing a husband.

[18] Although Coming of Age received significant interest and praise from the academic community, Mead's research methodology also came in for criticism from several reviewers and fellow anthropologists.

Mead was criticized for not separating her personal speculation and opinions from her ethnographic description of Samoan life and for making sweeping generalizations based on a relatively short period of study.

[23] After an initial flurry of discussion, many anthropologists concluded that Freeman systematically misrepresented Mead's views on the relationship between nature and nurture, as well as the data on Samoan culture.

Neolocal residence patterns result from young adults living in industrial societies who move to take new jobs or in similar geographically mobile populations.

[23]: xvi Second, Freeman's critics point out that, by the time he arrived on the scene, Mead's original informants were old women, grandmothers, and had converted to Christianity, so their testimony to him may not have been accurate.

Their criticism was made formal at the 82nd annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association the next month in Chicago, where a special session, to which Freeman was not invited, was held to discuss his book.

Freeman commented that "to seek to dispose of a major scientific issue by a show of hands is a striking demonstration of the way in which belief can come to dominate the thinking of scholars".

[34] Lowell Holmes – who completed a lesser-publicized re-study – commented later: "Mead was better able to identify with, and therefore establish rapport with, adolescents and young adults on issues of sexuality than either I (at age 29, married with a wife and child) or Freeman, ten years my senior.

"[35] In 1996, Martin Orans published his review[36] of Mead's notes preserved at the Library of Congress, crediting her for leaving all her recorded data as available to the general public.

Orans concludes that due to Mead's interpretive approach – common to most contemporary cultural anthropology – her hypotheses and conclusions are essentially unfalsifiable and therefore "not even wrong".

[37] It included new material, in particular interviews that Freeman called of "exceptional historical significance" and "of quite fundamental importance" of one of Mead's then-adolescent informants by a Samoan chief from the National University of Samoa (in 1988 and 1993) and of her daughter (in 1995).

He concludes in the introduction to the book that "her exciting revelations about sexual behavior were in some cases merely the extrapolations of whispered intimacies, whereas those of greatest consequence were the results of a prankish hoax".

[37]: 1 Freeman argues that Mead collected other evidence that contradicts her own conclusion, such as a tutor who related that as of puberty girls were always escorted by female family members.

Freeman claims Mead's letters to Boas reflect that she was influenced by studies of sexuality from Marquesas Islands, and that she was seeking to confirm the same information by questioning Fa'apua'a and Fofoa.

Instead, Margaret Mead's account of adolescent sexual behavior in Coming of Age in Samoa and elsewhere was based on what she had been told by Fa'apua'a and Fofoa, supplemented by other such inquiries that she had previously made.