Samuel Stouffer and the GI Survey: Sociologists and Soldiers during the Second World War Joseph W.Ryan. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2013.

Abstract

Samuel Stouffer and the GI Survey: Sociologists and Soldiers during the Second World War Joseph W. Ryan. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2013.In 1941, Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, concerned about the mass of newly drafted soldiers who had trouble adjusting to military life as manifested in the morale crisis of that summer, enlisted the services of social scientists to conduct interviews and surveys of American GIs to find out what they thought about the army. He did so over the objections of many military leaders whose resistance to the idea of polling was deeply entrenched and had to be overcome during the war. Samuel A. Stouffer, then a University of Chicago sociology professor, was selected to lead this effort. In his role as head of the Army Information and Education Division's Research Brand, he directed a team of sociologists, psychologists, and statisticians who sought to understand a range of problems that afflicted the US Army. Stouffer and his associates investigated such important issues as why men fought, what sustained them in battle, what they thought of their allies and enemies, and why a substantial number became psychiatric casualties. The focus was on soldier attitudes and organizational and small-group processes with an emphasis on policy applications at army level, based on the Research Branch's primary role as vehicle of social engineering.Stouffer and his team administered over two hundred different questionnaires, many of which contained over one hundred items, to more than one-half million American soldiers in all parts of the world. Anecdotal data from case studies were used to illustrate and provide a different check of the findings. They also pioneered focus groups as research method and demonstrated that this combination of sociological methods was highly effective in debunking myths about social life in military units. An eminent example is the discovery that enlisted combat groups were more motivated by a desire to finish the task, to end the war, than by any other factor, including buddy or idealist motivations like patriotism. In general, returning veterans were ethnocentrically and individualistically motivated - an understandable self-centered orientation given the often great personal sacrifices they made during the war. But this challenges the oversimplified view of the World War II veterans in the Greatest Generation mythology that prevails in American culture today.Stouffer and his associates published monthly reports entitled What the Soldier Thinks and made the most important research findings public after the war through the two-volume study The American Soldier, published in 1949. The topics included analytical descriptions of morale, social cohesion and performance, social mobility, motivation, job satisfaction, attitudes toward and behavior in combat, including issues concerning fear, hostility and aggression, organizational change, social problems in the field, blackwhite relations, and demographics of troops and veterans. Stouffer's wartime work influenced multiple facets of policy, including demobilization and the GI Bill. Already by 1930, his ideas on empirical survey research had become part of what was rapidly developing into the mainstream of sociology in America. …