Data sources

Looking away from the gaps in datagathering both in a time sense and in a societal contextual sense, the WLS’57 should be a useful tool if complemented with other instruments and if applied narrowly to illuminate the most central topics in which it is interested. It appeared to me that it looked at social safety nets but shunned the non-nuclear family; and, though it acknowledges unconventional living arrangements, at least as far as the printed questions extend, it skips looking at matters such as trial marriages, though the ’57 generation was a smidgeon early for much of the social change that occurred in the substrate civilization over the years the study spans. Effectively the entire study concluded before the internet existed, which is another drawback; and no interviews were conducted during the go-go years of the late 90s when entrepreneurial spirit and affluence seemed to abound in our nation and other parts of the first world; though emphasizing highschool graduation as it does, the project obviously is looking at potential material for recruitment to the university rather than other kinds of educational experience, though there may be sorts to extract data on a set of individuals such as grad school attendees and research assistants in post grad settings. Virtually all of the males arrived at adulthood in the conscriptive military obligation world, yet were gap dwellers in the sense their peers missed wartime involvement; too young for Korea, and by the time the US was defoliating the Mekong in 1968 the study group males were too old for the wholesale draft of the late 1960s; I expect many of them helped the war in southeast Asia escalate in its early years. I appreciated the self consciousness the study exhibited in defining its sample population’s race and ancestry. It would be wonderful if the interview reports are ample, extending beyond the radio-button checkbox profile the website shows. Since so much occurred in the US at the time these folks were leaving high school I would wonder what kinds of cars they drove; whether they thought becoming a poet was a realistic aspiration; how closely their parents kept informed about their whereabouts and goings-on; and whether they opted for college in one of the coastal meccas where scions of the effete literati attended university. There are so many excellent liberal arts colleges in middle America, there might have been little incentive for most in the group to venture to coastlands, but deep changes in society were occurring when they were in their twenties, trends which were very prominently observable in progressive coastal urban areas, which were fairly nascent or pregerminal in middle America then. I want to look at the pilot link you provided, as well. UW has a rich history in the intellectual world.