Student Papers: 1924—1960s
The Romanzo Adams Social Research Laboratory Student Papers echoed the concern of the faculty in the Laboratory to document the variety of sociological phenomena occurring in Hawaii. From the beginning, race relations was one of the primary subjects. Ethnic identities and relations received equal emphasis. Cultural and religious institutions within the various groups and generational conflicts are also widely covered. Though the United states military has wielded immense influence in Hawaii during the twentieth century, during World War II the heavy influx of military personnel and Mainland civilians into Hawaii had a major impact on daily life here, resulting in an increase in student papers on subjects related to haoles, interracial dating and marriage, race relations, and the changing workplace relations. Changing ethnic customs, labor unions, the coming of statehood and politics of the post-World War II period are also covered. The papers offer firsthand accounts of what the people of Hawaii thought and felt over a forty-year period of change, turmoil and progress.
The Student Papers are currently divided into three subseries marked with letters. Subseries A is student papers in which the author is identified by name. The papers are filed alphabetically by surname. These papers date from as early as 1924 into the 1950s and cover a wide range of topics. The second subseries, Subseries B, consists primarily of student papers whose authors’ identities are hidden by codes although some names are also given. The codes usually identify the sociology class and section for which the paper was written, the student’s ethnicity and sex. A typical code may be 254-2-j-f-25 referring to Sociology 254, section 2, with the author being a Japanese female, number 25. Other codes include the calendar year and semester of the course. The code system allowed RASRL faculty to make student papers immediately available to other sociology students without endangering the privacy of the writers. The dates of the second subseries overlap somewhat with the first and extend into the late 1960s. This ending date shows the merging that faculty in Sociology made between RASRL and their classes; faculty continued filing student papers from their classes in the RASRL files after RASRL was disorganized in 1963/64. Third subseries, Subseries J, are student journals, much more abbreviated entries, made over a period of time and documenting concerns of the sociological class(es) being taken by the students. The Journals subseries occurred primarily during World War II and may have been instituted by RASRL faculty because of the need to restrict consumption of paper and other commodities.
A finding aid for this series is also available in the Archives Reading Room.
