Mead's field work for "Coming of Age" was also scrutinized, and major discrepancies were found between her published statements and her field data.
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. In the 1980s, Derek Freeman contested many of Mead's claims, and argued that she was hoaxed into counterfactually believing that Samoan culture had more relaxed sexual norms than Western culture. 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. The book has sparked years of ongoing and intense debate and controversy on questions pertaining to society, culture, and science. 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.
First published in 1928, the book launched Mead as a pioneering researcher and as the most famous anthropologist in the world.
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