Review of The American soldier: Vol. 1, Adjustment during army life; Vol. 2

Abstract

Reviews the book, The American soldier: Volume I, Adjustment during army life; Volume II, Combat and its aftermath by Samuel A. Stouffer et al (1949). These are the first two of four volumes prepared and edited under the auspices of a Special Committee of the Social Science Research Council. The material reported is based upon data concerning soldiers' attitudes collected by the Research Branch of the Information and Education Division, War Department, during the period, December, 1941, to August, 1945. Although the first two volumes are primarily intended for the army, historians, social psychologists, and sociologists, they contain much useful information for the industrial psychologist and personnel workers. This is indicated by the following topics discussed in some detail in the various chapters: job satisfaction and job morale; leadership and social control; motivation; social mobility; adjustment; promotion; training. Most of these subjects are covered in Volume I which deals with the period of adjustment during army life. Volume II is primarily concerned with combat and its aftermath. Since many readers of this journal will be primarily interested in Volume I, it is unfortunate that separate indexes for the two volumes were not prepared. As it is, a single index is included in Volume II. It is worth mentioning also that the index does not contain entries for the pertinent problems of reliability and validity, although some attempts at validation of the questionnaires were made and are discussed in the volumes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)