DOI: 10.3886/icpsr09584.v1
title: Soviet Military-Civilian Interview Project, 1983-1987
title: Version 1

description: The Military-Civilian Interview Project interviewed male former Soviet citizens currently residing in the United States about their military and civilian workplace experiences. Respondents were asked to comment on whether plans to emigrate changed their lives significantly and if so, to specify the ways in which their lives changed. Other areas of investigation included civilian and military morale, service avoidance, and how factors such as nationality composition of the work force and initiative shown by the respondent related to performance in the military and civilian sectors. Questions relating to the military dealt with areas such as branch of service, combat experience, quality and type of equipment utilized, extent of training for military service, specific job assignments, working relationships between ethnic groups, instances and methods of military discipline, and relationship between supervisors. Parallel questions were asked about civilian work experiences. A series of questions concerning what lessons the United States could learn from the Soviet military was also asked. Demographic information elicited included age, languages spoken (other than Russian), political party affiliation, education, time frame of emigration, father's social group and military service, and city of residence at age 17.
description: ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection: Standardized missing values..
description: Datasets: 
 
 DS0: Study-Level Files 
 DS1: Main Data File 
 DS2: SPSS Export File 
 DS3: SAS Input 
 DS4: SAS Labels 
 DS5: SAS Missing Value Recode 
 DS6: SAS Format 
 DS7: SAS Proc Format 
 DS8: SPSS Data List 
 DS9: SPSS Variable Labels 
 DS10: SPSS Value Labels 
 DS11: SPSS Missing Value Recode
description: (1) Norman Nie, of SPSS Incorporated and University of Chicago, Department of Political Science, was a special collaborator on this study. (2) The original questionnaire was written in English and translated into Russian. The Russian version was administered. (3) ICPSR also distributes a related data collection, SOVIET INTERVIEW PROJECT, 1979-1985 (ICPSR 8694).
description: The universe is a fairly complete list of 33,624 emigrants who arrived in the United States between January 1, 1979, and April 30, 1982. However, the focus of the study is the "referent Soviet population" (the sector of Soviet society the survey respondents could represent). The referent Soviet population is the "adult European population in large- and medium-sized Soviet cities."
description: Probability sample stratified on four background variables: nationality, region of last employment in the USSR, highest level of education attained, and size of city in which last employed. Individuals included in the sample were male emigrants between the ages of 21 and 70 inclusive at the time of arrival. Those with military service must have served after 1968, or have achieved the rank of captain.