Research on the American Soldier as a Career Contingency

Abstract

The career contingency to be discussed is not authorship of the volumes of The American Soldier, but rather membership in the group of social scientists who during World War II carried out the research subsequently reported in The American Soldier. What was the prior background and experience of the professional staff of the Research Branch? What did it mean for subsequent careers to have been part of that research group? In what ways did Research Branch experience make a difference? Obviously these are not easy questions to answer. Any one set of experiences in the course of a lifetime may reinforce earlier choices of direction and value orientations, may point out new directions or possibilities, or may have little influence on subsequent orientations or career lines. One can assess either the subjective perceptions of participants in a given experience as to what that experience meant for them in the long run or the objective evidence of their careers at some later date. I shall employ both approaches, though at a much more superficial level of analysis than I would wish, had I more time and resources for the task. To inform this inquiry, I sent a brief questionnaire to each surviving member of the Branch who had been engaged in the research process and for whom I was able to obtain a reasonably current address. A few of the questionnaires could not be delivered and were returned unclaimed. Nevertheless, I ultimately received questionnaires and a good many letters from 24 of the 25 persons for whom an address known to be valid had been obtained, not counting two wives who had been on the staff at the same time as their husbands and who did not return questionnaires. My respondents are drawn primarily from male members of the professional staff who were under 30 when they joined the Research Branch and whose career lines led them to maintain membership in the American Association of Public Opinion Research, the American Psychological Association or the American Sociological Association, the directories of which were the primary sources of current addresses. A majority of those over 30 in 1942