Background
He was born in Toronto, Ontario but was raised in Los Angeles and attended University of California, Los Angeles at the age of 16, dropping out in his junior year to join the military.
He was born in Toronto, Ontario but was raised in Los Angeles and attended University of California, Los Angeles at the age of 16, dropping out in his junior year to join the military.
AB, University of California at Los Angeles, 1950; Master of Arts, University of California at Los Angeles, 1951; Doctor of Philosophy, University of California at Los Angeles, 1953.
In 1939, he joined the army serving in Infantry, as an Officer in the Army Finance Department and in the Military Intelligence Service, screening officials and prisoners of war in Germany. He did fieldwork in Austria (1956) and in Greece, Switzerland and Belgium (1965–1966). From 1954–1955, Naroll was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.
After, he moved to the Washington, District of Columbia The author of eight books, several articles and book reviews, Naroll did research in many disciplines.
His first book, Data Quality Control, a new research technique. Prolegomena to a cross-cultural study of culture stress, concerns the issue of trustworthiness of data and methodology used in studying cultures.
Much of his later research was concerned with the application of cross-cultural anthropological theory to historical data. Texts such as and Military Deterrence in History (1974) point to Naroll"s concerns and scholarship on war and military studies. is a broad, evolutionary study of ten factors of social life, from a cross-cultural perspective.
Naroll was a member of the faculty of the San Fernando Valley State College (later renamed California State University, Northridge) (1957–1962), Northwestern University (1962–1967), the University at Buffalo (1967–1984), and was a past president of the Human Relations Area Files.
Married Frada Kaufman, 1941. 1 child, Maud.