Background
Samuel Stouffer was born in Sac City, Iowa, on June 6, 1900.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000JJGQU0/?tag=2022091-20
( If there is a-"desert island" book in the conduct of so...)
If there is a-"desert island" book in the conduct of social research, it is arguably this book. Whether in terms of sociological structures or psychological nuances, Communism, 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. Stouffer explores attitudes of Americans against a backdrop of a history of intolerance that dates back to the Know-Nothing party before the Civil War and extending through the Ku Klux Klan after World War I. The overall results show a markedly strong relationship between perception of high national risk and personal intolerance of differences, and also the perception of threat and tolerance that operates as a predisposing tendency that affects judgments about specific political movements and events. Stouffer enriches the sense and meaning of survey research by emphasizing patterns of percentages rather than actual amounts; survey craftsmanship; the use of paired sampling techniques to reduce problems of chance; the importance of completion rates in survey research work; the importance of interruptions during a questioning period; the choice of field workers in performing the surveys. The actual survey instruments are included as prepared by the National Opinion Research Center and the Gallup Organization. They remain a model for large-scale samples of this kind. The beautiful, highly personal, introduction by James Davis places Stouffer in an appropriate academic and professional context. Stouffer was a great sociologist with two landmark efforts to his credit: The American Soldier and then Communism, Conformity and Civil Liberties. Professor Davis calls this "a great classic of empirical sociology." It is indeed that: a model of craftsmanship, exemplary argumentation, and presentation of data still unsurpassed. The book is not part of ancient history, but of living, democratic culture.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1560006137/?tag=2022091-20
Samuel Stouffer was born in Sac City, Iowa, on June 6, 1900.
After receiving a bachelor's degree at Morningside College in lowa (1921), he took graduate work at Harvard University and then at the University of Chicago, where he obtained a doctorate in sociology (1930).
He taught at the universities of Chicago and Wisconsin and worked with several governmental agencies during the 1930s. During World War II he was director of the professional staff of the Information and Education Department of the War Department. In that position, he directed an important series of studies on attitudes of servicemen. In 1946 he went to Harvard, where he was director of the Laboratory of Social Relations and professor of sociology until his death on August 24, 1960. Stouffer's work was marked by a dominant interest in the use of varied research techniques, rather than a sustained focus on one or two topical areas in sociology. His doctoral dissertation dealt with the relative merits of the case-study method and the statistical approach. In the 1930s he critically reviewed data on marriage in his Research Memorandum on the Family in the Depression (1937), and he began to investigate the area of opinion research and mass communications, incorporating his findings in a chapter of Paul F. Lazarsfeld's Radio and the Printed Page (1940). A sophisticated use of statistical methods by Stouffer was first widely recognized in his analysis of factors in migration (1940). He theorized that the number of migrants between two communities not only was influenced by the opportunities at the receiving community, but was modified or reduced by the presence of opportunities between home community and potential destination. By ingenious use of local rental data, he was able to obtain enough confirmation to stimulate several comparable studies of this basic problem that accurately described and partially explained migrant patterns in the United States. Stouffer's stature as a research sociologist rests on his experience with survey research techniques, which came to fruition in studies on attitudes and difficulties of American military men during World War II. These were published in four volumes known as The American Soldier (1949 - 1950), with Stouffer as leading researcher, editor, or contributor. Stouffer and his associates not only developed useful research techniques (such as scalogram analysis), but demonstrated the importance of relativity in people's judgments of both their rewarding and frustrating social experiences. In the last decade of his career, Stouffer turned to the study of attitudes in situations of conflicting values and roles. He became interested in the actual barriers to educational advancement and mobility among youngsters and, more generally, in the study of the compromises made by people faced by inconsistent moral directives. His major work in this area was the national survey on differences in tolerance of nonconformity, published as Communism, Conformity, and Civil Liberties (1955). Stouffer was able to show that tolerance was connected with education, urban residence, and personal optimism.
Samuel Stouffer’s influence reaches well beyond military history and sociology. His work is cited in journals as diverse as Child Development Abstract, The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, and Commentary. His research has had a lasting effect on polling procedures and analysis, market research and interpretation, race relations, population and nuclear policies, education, and economics. Additionally, his clear, honest writing style, free of unexplained jargon and “bureaucratese”, remains a model of the simple, elegant use of the English language.
( If there is a-"desert island" book in the conduct of so...)
Stouffer is described by his family and those who knew him well as a gentleman of warmth, compassion, restless energy, high standards, depth, and a puckish sense of humor. His academic lectures, through which he often chain-smoked, were littered with allusions and quotations from Shakespeare, and these would often be accompanied by baseball statistics. Deeply intellectually curious and impatient for survey results, Prof. Stouffer would frequently sit by the IBM punched card sifting machine to see the raw answers to his queries. (These traits help to explain how he produced the classic Communism, Conformity and Civil Liberties so quickly).
He married Ruth McBurney in 1924, with whom he had three children.
