The Naval Reservist: An Empirical Assessment of Ephemeral Role Enactment

Abstract

Questionnaire data from 3,254 Naval Reservists were used to assess ephemeral role enactment, and its relation to model and operating dominant roles. Satisfaction of 14 individual needs was measured with identical Likert items in scales concerning active duty, Reserve Drill, and civilian occupation. Reservists were divided into categories of more and less satisfaction with Reserve Drill, and comparisons were made of scale-item means. The more satisfied Reservists reported a balance of satisfactions among the model dominant role (past active duty), operating dominant role (civilian occupation), and ephemeral role (Reserve Drill), and reported several specific needs better satisfied in the ephemeral role than in the model and operating dominant roles. The less satisfied Reservists reported an imbalance of overall satisfactions in favor of the operating dominant role, and reported virtually no specific needs better satisfied in the model dominant and ephemeral roles than in the operating dominant role. The more satisfied Reservists were enacting Reserve Drill as an ephemeral role, and had been influenced by active duty as a model dominant role. That persons daily enact complex role-sets is a sociological truism (Biddle and Thomas; Goffman; Gross et al.; Merton, a, b; Parsons; Sarbin and Allen; Turner, b, c). That some components of those role-sets complement each other and some conflict, influenced by the social situation, similarly is conventional wisdom (Burchard; Cummings and El Salmi; Goode; Sieber; Snoek; Toby; Zurcher et al., c). But how structural arrangements contribute to role congruence or conflict, how role conflict and congruence are related to individual needs, and how congruence-seeking or conflict-resolving are conducted by the individual, are less well-documented.