The Practice of Social Research

Chapter Fifteen.  The Elaboration Model


The Origins of the Elaboration Model


In the WWII studies of The American Soldier, Sam Stouffer and his colleagues uncovered a number of unexpected relationships among variables.  For example, everyone was surprised to find that educated soldiers were more likely to accept their being drafted into the army as fair than was the case for those with less education.  It had been assumed that the more educated soldiers would have had elitist feelings that they should have been deferred from the draft.  Stouffer suggested the reason for this surprising discovery.  Those with the least education--factory workers and farmers, for example--were often deferred because their jobs were regarded as "essential to the war effort."  Not many English lit majors got such deferments.

Given this pattern of deferments, Stouffer reasoned, those soldiers with less education were more likely to have friends who had been deferred than would be true for those with more education.  If it were possible to take into account whether the soldier-respondents had friends deferred, Stouffer suggested that information could be used to interpret the relationship between education and acceptance of being drafted.  Unfortunately, those data were not collected in the surveys.

Paul Lazarsfeld and his wife, Patricia Kendall, created hypothetical data to illustrate Stouffer's reasoning.  Beginning with the tables Stouffer had created from this surveys, they made up tables that included the missing variable (whether friends were deferred)--tables that would prove Stouffer's point.  In the process, they generated a logical system for understanding multivariate relationships.