Samuel A. Stouffer

The American soldier : combat and its aftermath

The American Soldier: Combat and Its Aftermath was the first comprehensive study ever undertaken of the attitudes of combat infantrymen in war. Working from large survey samples taken among infantrymen who fought in World War II, Samuel Stouffer and his associates presented the first data available on individual men’s feelings about their performance and motivation in combat. This volume became the essential source of data on soldiers for scholars working in military, organizational, and social psychology. Stouffer’s study concluded that in World War II neither ideology nor patriotism was the major motivating factor for soldiers in combat. The main motivations were, rather, unity and the bonds soldiers formed with each other. Stouffer’s work formed the basis for research into topics ranging from the moral dilemma of killing to how to enhance individual performance in military operations, and it is still cited today. At the time this book was published, the New York Times called the study “a monumental contribution to the science of making citizens of a free country win its wars.” This book was one of a four-volume set. The other volumes bore the subtitles Adjustment during Army Life, Experiments on Mass Communication, and Measurement and Prediction. Combat and Its Aftermath has been the most frequently cited among the volumes.

Communism, conformity, and civil liberties : a cross-section of the nation speaks its mind

Whether in terms of sociological structures or psychological nuances, Com munism, Conformity, and Civil Liberties, originally published in 1955, is a recognized landmark. Stouffer helped strengthen the fundamental liberties of all Americans by showing dangerous consequences of efforts to thwart a perceived Communist conspiracy, including some of the very real liberties that can be destroyed in the process of a witch-hunt.

Toward a General Theory of Action.

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Trends in the Fertility of Catholics and Non-Catholics

Analysis of the confinement rates of 40,766 urban families in Wisconsin shows that between 1919 and 1933 the fertility of Catholics declined at a faster rate than the fertility of non-Catholics. When the data were divided into twenty-four groups by residence, age of wife, occupation of husband, and interval after marriage, it was found that births among Catholic families fell off in twenty-three of the twenty-four groups, while in twenty-one groups the Catholic fertility dropped faster than the non-Catholic fertility. The decline in Catholic fertility was as much in evidence among people with Slavic and Romance-language names in each Catholic occupational group as it was among people with Teutonic, Irish, and English names. That these findings may be generalized beyond Wisconsin is suggested, though not proved, by a partial correlation analysis which shows, with several factors held constant, that the northern and western cities of the United States with a relatively large percentage of Catholics tended to decline in fertility at a more rapid rate between 1920 and 1930 than the northern and western cities with a relatively small percentage of Catholics.

Statistical Induction in Rural Social Research

number of mules required to set a given number of families on the road to selfsupport, important as these facts are. It will require research carried on side by side with experimentation to discover capacities to master the intricate tasks of balanced farming and home-making. One must also know the attitude which the responsible members of the family will take toward obligations, especially those obligations which run over long periods of time and require steadfastness of character to insure regularity of payments. It will be necessary to discover ways and means of placing them on desirable acreages of land on a long-time tenure basis. Patterns for financial assistance and supervision must be devised and the extent of governmental and of local community responsibility estimated and set forth in working terms. The kind of knowledge necessary to attack the problem of finding families qualified for farm ownership is all too inadequately discussed. It would require as much or more space to indicate the kind of social knowledge necessary to the social reconstruction of the individual lives of those who have been broken in courage and deprived of hope by the many months of economic failure and the final desperate acceptance of relief. While it must be anticipated that there will be a small percentage of failures in any such experiment, the practical purpose of research is to reduce the percentage to the smallest possible margin. It will be seen at once that this kind of research must be done by social scientists who can work with the tireless alertness and patience of the natural scientist among his test plots, and who possess an unusual amount of insight and understanding. The quest for knowledge for its own sake motivates the true scientist at all times but the need to solve practical problems lies at the root of much of his achievement. Just now the social scientist is required to keep practical considerations in the foreground, not necessarily forgetting social theory, but utilizing the opportunity which social experimentation offers to test the results of research in a program of practical action. This program must necessarily be adjusted to new facts and be sensitive to the challenge of new trails in social discovery.

Testing the Significance of Comparisons in Sociological Data

To explain the difference in parole violation rates of lone and group offenders, a large group of parole cases were successively subdivided as native or foreign born, as having or not having a previous criminal record, and finally, as group or lone offenders. Among the foreign-born first offenders the difference in violation rates was significant; it was not significant, however, for recidivists. But a comparison between these two differences indicated that the absence of a previous criminal record was definitely associated with the lower violation rate of group offenders. A similar treatment of native cases showed that there was no such association between criminal record and presence or absence of associates. However, the difference in these differences as between native and foreign-born cases was significant and therefore would warrant further subdivision with an additional variable. This process of successive subdivision is suggested as a fruitful method of sociological analysis.