UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

Interview #299
HAUSER, ROBERT M.

HAUSER, Robert M. (1942- )
Professor of Sociology
At UW: 1969-

Interviewed: 1985	
Interviewer: Laura Smail
Length: 3 hours 50 minutes

Background; Undergraduate experience at University of Chicago; Graduate work at Michigan; Year teaching at Brown; Appointment at UW; Wisconsin Longitudinal Study; Research on occupational changes in generation; Issue of access to data; Current projects; Colleagues; Sewall Wright's contributions.

Tape 1

00:00:04	Background.  Uncle, Philip Hauser, chair of sociology at Chicago.  Hauser's early entrance to Chicago.  First job-- population research.  Reynolds Farley.

00:06:29	Major in economics.  Reasons.  Math courses.  Chicago policy re class attendance.  Uncle's influence on choice of graduate school.  Poor undergraduate record.  Applications.  Acceptances.  Uncle's pressure to choose Michigan.  Had been doing research since age 14.  Describes.  Operations Research Office, Johns Hopkins.  Under army.  Projects worked on.  Use of computer.  Hauser worked for ORO through junior year summer.

00:22:24	Hauser's grandfather a Wobbly.  Father a Communist Party member briefly.  Loyalty hearings, and cleared, but a hard time.  No salary.  Father's lawyer was Karen O'Neil's father.

00:26:13	More on ORO.  

00:27:30	Hauser began working for urban renewal consultant in Chicago.  Ties to University. 

00:28:33	University trying to recover property lost during Hutchins era.  Study of feasibility of high rent residential development in central business district.  Reading WH did on zoning, land use.  Interested in urban renewal, planned become real estate lawyer after graduate school.  Anecdote about application to Michigan.

00:34:26	More on undergraduate courses.  Genetics.  Chicago's lack of interest in undergraduates.  Hauser learned mainly from outside jobs.  Also learned to use subsidiary libraries.  A valuable statistics course with K. A. Brownley.  What he learned.  Insistence now that students must be much better trained.

00:44:28	Graduate School.  Amos Hawley.  Two papers Hauser wrote.  One for Hawley, one for Al Reese.  Hawley left.  Marked as promising graduate student.  Never had to work for anyone.  Duncan's personality.

00:49:22	The Detroit Area Study.  How it worked.  Second year Hauser a TA for the Detroit Study.  Became comfortable doing surveys.

00:53:12	Poorly trained in demography.  Man who taught it taught unfolding theory instead.  Waste of time.

00:54:40	What turned him on--Blau-Duncan's American Occupational Structure.  1967.  Its impact.

00:56:60	End of tape.

Tape 2

00:00:01	Sewall Wright's work on path analysis not publicized, got lost.  Ogburn and an economist at UC reinvented things he'd already done.  Used by Blau and Duncan.  Work Hauser had done ended up in Duncan's book.  Hauser's interpretation of this.  Good teaching but leads to ambiguities.  Dudley an advisor.

00:09:28	Looking for thesis subject.  Steered off Coleman's data by Duncan.  Suggested using Rees' data from high school student survey in Tennessee.  Describes.  1957.  Had punched cards.  The job of resurrecting them (damaged in a flood) and of doing the correlating.

00:17:11	Dissertation year over.  Had to get a job.  The job market.  The feeder relationship with UW.  Why he took the job at Brown.  The department there.  Period of best contact with Duncan was during that year in the correspondence re his thesis.  

00:25:18	Hauser's links with Sewell.  The interview at Russell Sage Foundation. 

00:29:00	End of side.

00:29:04	Visit to UW.  Impressions of it.  Contrast of department to those at Brown and Michigan.  Also invited to Chicago.

00:38:20	His publications as of then--none.  MS of thesis.  Article coming out in American Journal of Sociology.  The article on theory of group effects written as a joke.  Why he wrote it.  Duncan's reaction; Norm Ryder's.

00:50:15	The gist of his thesis.  The need for more data to support any kind of theory re schools.  Came here to use Sewell data.

00:55:54	End of tape.

Tape 3

00:00:01	Sewell data already being worked on.  The luck that the questions included names and addresses of parents.  Little's follow up study.  The impact of the first two articles by Sewell and Haller.  The focus of the articles.  The weakness of the social-psychological questions on the original questionnaire.  Hauser's recent study measuring quality of original items.  The character of the data outweighs the disadvantages.

00:09:55	The question of how Sewell and Haller's ideas of what affects decision making affected their questions and their findings.  Sewell and Haller were working on first article when Hauser arrived.  Didn't want Hauser to interfere though he did do some work on some of statistical assumptions.  Hauser had new baby and was revising dissertation for publication.  Had read Sewell's papers.  But no model of process of stratification done until the two articles came out.

00:17:45	Hauser building path models for dissertation research.  Interested in path analysis.  Duncan working on psychological aspects of social stratification with Beverly Duncan and David Featherman, then a graduate student at Michigan.  Duncan encouraged Sewell to attempt larger models.  Hauser did also.

00:20:30	Sewell and Haller not using data on earnings.  The state of the data.  Hauser used it for article in 1970.  

00:26:00	Hauser had no post-schooling outcomes on data he'd been working on.  Sociology literature and policy literature very odd at that time--made strong presumptions of relationship of sibling and social and economic success, but little evidence, even in 1970.  Now a great many long term studies.  Duncan and Featherman were looking for such evidence.

00:29:25	End of side.

00:29:27	Christopher Jencks, Inequality.  1972.  Controversy over it.  His background.

00:31:47	The longitudinal studies in existence now.  Comparison to Sewell's data.  Invalidity of criticisms of Sewell data.  Real weakness of Sewell data is lack of blacks and fact that isn't of birth cohorts.

00:40:20	Question re competition.  Yes, exists.  Social stratification research had an agenda.  Duncan-Blau book set out statements.  UW project filling in details.  Anyone could--very clear what next to be done.  Came up internally.  Featherman and Hauser's work on occupational changes.  What they wanted to do.  Both assistant professors.  Who should do what.  How divide credit.  Their solution.  Contrast to solution in life sciences research.  Sewell's suggestion.  Plenty of room for both since so much to do.  

00:49:25	Problem of access to data.  Hauser and Featherman  expected to turn OCG data over to public domain but issue of how much lead time.  Hauser thinks were too protective.  Needn't have been.  Fear of being scooped probably groundless.  Work ought to be replicable.  Problems this creates.  Time wasting.  Happens endlessly.  Duncan handles it by ignoring challenges.  RH can't do that.  No research support for dealing with mail, but can't always just shrug shoulders.

00:57:23	End of tape.

Tape 4

00:00:02	More on issue of access to data.  Hauser and his wife putting all data in public domain, in software.  Reasons. 

00:05:48	Hauser's three projects.  The work with Bill; the OCG project with Dave; the work with Art Goldberger and training program on use of statistical methods.  Dave never involved in Wisconsin Longitudinal Study.  Featherman worked with Haller.  Haller had interviewed high school kids from a county in Michigan.  Followed up the sample.  Sewell and Hauser stole a lot of questions for their 1975 follow up of Wisconsin people from work Dave had done.  He knew; didn't object.  Hauser notes, better never to have to use a new question.  Sewell and Hauser analyzing Wisconsin data.  Then Hauser and Featherman got OCG project started, and as part of that did reanalysis of raw data from Blau-Duncan survey.  Meanwhile designing new survey for 1973.  Also got money to have WSRL carry out replicate of national survey representative of black and white men in Wisconsin.  Part of effort was to find out how well people could talk about their social backgrounds.  Reasons had to do with Marxist criticisms of Blau-Duncan study.  They questions they asked.  Compared with census data.  Census Bureau botched up so didn't get results.  Featherman added questions about upbringing, more detailed, softer.

00:17:00	What Hauser wants to do now.  Piecing data together  synthetically.  Current paper with Sewell on birth order effects on educational attainment.  Reasons did.  Blau's theory of family climate.  The Blau-Duncan questionnaire, the question re sibling schooling.  The difficulty Featherman and Hauser had framing the question better.  Blau's theory re older brothers.  Duncan's opposition.  Reasons.  The alternative statements in their book.  Sandy Jencks' work on sibling correlations.

00:27:28	Stuff from behavioral genetics beginning to come in.  Q. re people here in the field.  

00:29:33	End of side.

00:29:35	Sewall Wright's work in the 1930s on twin IQ data.  Goldberger's disproof of models showing heritability of IQ.

00:31:22	Jencks's appendix on the subject.  Hauser thinks fraudulence of work of Burt in England showed up at this time. Featherman and Hauser in the OCG study tried only to improve the quality of the questions re brother, didn't add information.  Sewell and Hauser wanted to push the whole thing on brothers further.  Knew about study by Olneck in Kalamazoo.  (Reasons he's here now; had been a student of Jencks at Harvard.  Was a radical, under influence of two economists at Harvard who were critics of OCG data.  Sewell one day told Hauser about school records in Jackson, Michigan, where his sister worked.  Suggested study of school records in a Michigan study.  Hauser had had a letter from Olneck who was doing just that.  So Sewell and Hauser got him here.)  Hauser's review of Jencks's Appendix B.

00:40:20	In the 1975 follow up survey, included the sibling roster.  Asked questions about one sibling, planning possibly to do a survey of the siblings.  Had to do a feasibility study as to whether possible to find achievement test scores for the siblings.  Went to Education School for testing records.  Describes them.  Did a pilot study. 

00:49:58	Question re mother's influence.  Discusses.

00:55:13	Other issue, whether there would be more study of women.

00:56:40	End of Interview

END