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.