Final answer:
Margaret Mead's study in New Guinea focused on understanding gender roles within different societies, challenging the notion of innate gender differences and emphasizing the cultural shaping of human behaviors and temperaments.
Step-by-step explanation:
The main focus for Margaret Mead's New Guinea study was the examination of gender roles and their variability across different societies. In her groundbreaking work, Mead explored gender through the lens of cultural norms rather than innate biological differences. This approach was famously documented in her 1935 book, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, where she discovered that among the Arapesh, men and women displayed similar temperaments, challenging widely held beliefs of the time about gender.
Margaret Mead also described the sexual life stages and the relatively free and open attitude toward sexuality in Samoan culture in her book Coming of Age in Samoa. This contrasted with the repressive attitudes she observed in Euro-American cultures, offering insights into how cultural environments shape human development and behaviors.