Social Science in Iraq
By Diane Swanbrow
ANN ARBOR, Mich.—University of Michigan studies are underway to assess how deployment is affecting the mental, emotional and physical health of U.S.University of Michigan social scientists have been on the front lines in Iraq measuring public sentiments about the big questions of Democracy and Islam, and gauging how this war is affecting American service people who live with uncertainty and danger daily.
U-M researchers Penny Pierce and Amiram Vinokur are assessing how deployment is affecting the mental, emotional and physical health of U.S. women and men serving in Iraq and the families they left behind.
Pierce is a colonel in the Air Force Reserve Program and an associate professor in the U-M School of Nursing and a faculty associate at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR). Vinokur is a research professor at ISR. They are interviewing randomly selected samples of 2,200 Air Force women and men stationed in Iraq and other sites around the world to determine the impact of various deployment experiences and family stressors on physical and mental health and on the likelihood that participants will remain in military service.
A similar study they conducted from 1992 to 1998 of women veterans of the 1991 Persian Gulf War found that women who served in the theater of war were actually more likely to stay in the military than those who served elsewhere.
"The situation today could be very different," Pierce said. "The Gulf War was a short, relatively popular war, compared to the conflict today. Also, in Iraq, more and more women are serving in dangerous jobs closer to combat than ever before, and we don’t know how the unique characteristics of this war will affect both men and women’s willingness to remain in military service."
Pierce and Vinokur hope to release preliminary findings from the studies in about a year.
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Just published in the January 2006 issue of the Journal of Democracy, is a study led by U-M political scientist Mark Tessler which found that more than three-quarters of Iraqis support a democratic political system, but the are evenly divided on the role Islam should play in their country’s government.
Half of the 2,325 Iraqis surveyed conducted in November and December 2004 favor a strong link between government and religion and half prefer a secular political system.
“The vast majority of Iraqis of all three of the country’s major ethnoreligious communities expressed support for democracy over authoritarian political systems,” said Tessler, who led the study with funding from the National Science Foundation.
Respondents came from Baghdad and 16 of Iraq’s 18 provinces, and included Shi’ites, Sunnis and Kurds in proportion to their numbers in the population. The researchers were unable to survey residents of Ninawa (Mosul) because of the security situation and Dahuk, because of opposition from Iraqi authorities.
Tessler and co-authors Mansoor Moaddell and Ronald Inglehart, all affiliated with the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR), found that Kurds and Sunnis were more likely to support a secular democracy, in which Islam plays no formal political role, while Shi’ites – who make up about 60 percent of the country’s population -- were more likely to favor an Islamic democracy, in which more people with strong religious beliefs hold public office and the government gives greater weight to Islamic laws.
“Given the violence and uncertainty prevailing in Iraq when this survey was conducted, the data allow for optimism in some important respects,” the authors conclude. “There is broad support for democracy and a majority attach more importance to forging a common national identity than to preserving and protecting their particular group’s special interests.
“Unfortunately, there is substantial disagreement about the role that Islam should play in political affairs, and this disagreement overlaps with and reinforces differences between Iraq’s major ethnoreligious communities.”
Read the Full Stories:
Stress on American service personnel in Iraq and elsewhere
http://www.umich.edu/news/index.html?Releases/2005/Dec05/r122005a
Iraqi citizen views on Democracy and Islam’s role in government. http://www.umich.edu/news/index.html?Releases/2006/Jan06/r011706
