David J. Armor

Armor has conducted extensive research on military issues, with a particular emphasis on military manpower issues, substance abuse, military health care.[10] Having considered the challenges Army faced with respect to manpower quality and quantity, he evaluated enlistment standards in the Army, and explored the extent of decline in the Army recruit quality, noting its effects on job performance. In addition, he contributed to an approach for assessing the "optimal" quality mixes, and discussed the costs to restore the Army quality.[11] Keeping race and gender representation at the core, he studied the policies concerning those factors, as well as issues pertaining to enlistment rates in the US military.[12] Furthermore, he measured the changes in the minority representation following the All-Volunteer Force (AVF), and addressed the trends of enlistment in the American and Hispanic minorities. He proposed that the Afghanistan wars have contributed to changes in representation across the recent decades.[13]

Armor also reviewed the patterns, and trends in the prevalence of sexual assault within the U.S. military, and inspected the measures, and strategies undertaken by the military to eliminate this issue.[14] While looking into the service delivery programs on mental health and substance abuse in Nevada, he discussed the recommendations for their improvement.[15]

While at Rand, Armor started a research program on alcohol-related issues and explored perspectives on alcoholism, treatment, remission patterns, treatment effectiveness, and policy implications.[16] Having assessed the remission process by investigating treated alcoholics over the course of four years, he revealed that remissions were not stable, but rather intermittent in nature.[17] Additionally, he evaluated the effectiveness of Air Forces Alcohol Abuse program and provided recommendations for improving its efficiency to better tackle the issue.[18]

Armor has contributed to the research literature in the field of research methods in sociology. He wrote a treatise on measures of reliability, proposing the coefficient of "Theta Reliability".[19] This was based on a unified theory of reliability for social measurement called the "time-item" model which integrated the benefits the internal consistency and stability models.[20]

Armor is best known for his research on education policy, particularly school desegregation.[21] He examined the educational and social impacts of school desegregation, and studied the effectiveness of school desegregation policy plans from 1968 to 1991 with a focus on White flight and interracial exposure.[22] He highlighted primary shortcomings of desegregation policies i.e., they did not succeed at improving the pedagogy,[23] and he found that school desegregation does not significantly or consistently impact African American achievement.[24] It was argued that SES, such as poverty and income levels act as significant factors in impacting the student achievement,[25][26] and indicated that increasing SES of African-American families contributes towards rising Black educational achievement.[27] In one of his essays, The Evidence on Busing, he argued that busing does not create academic advantages.[28] Another paper aimed at analyzing the reading program in selected Los Angeles minority schools, he reported that school and classroom factors, such as school autonomy, and teacher flexibility played a significant role in gains on CTBS reading test scores.[29]

Davison M. Douglas reviewed Armor's book, Forced Justice: School Desegregation and the Law and stated that it is a "helpful analysis that which should inform the ongoing and hotly contested debate over the benefits and costs of mandatory pupil reassignments in urban school systems."[30] The Desegregation Dilemma reviewing the same work added that, "Armor's discussions of the effectiveness of mandatory and voluntary techniques... will provide much-needed guidance for those who still wish to strive toward the integrative deal."[31]

In Armor's book, Maximizing Intelligence, Chester E. Finn highlighted that he "spells out ten "risk factors," and noted that his strategy to maximize children's intelligence is "via their parents and that the appropriate policy tools entail strengthening parents and families and mitigating the adverse "risk factors."[32]

• The American School Counselor: A Case Study in the Sociology of Professions (1969) ISBN 978-0871540690
• Data-text Primer: An Introduction to Computerized Social Data Analysis (1972) ISBN 978-0029010204
• Alcoholism and Treatment (1978) ISBN 978-0471025580
• School Desegregation in the 21st Century (2002) ISBN 978-0275977696
• Maximizing Intelligence (2013) ISBN 978-0765801852
• The Scandinavian Prison Study (2020) ISBN 978-3030264642

• Armor, D. J. (1972). The Evidence on Busing. Research Report. Public Interest, 28, 90-126.
• Armor, D. J. (1973). Theta reliability and factor scaling. Sociological methodology, 5, 17-50.
• Armor, D. (1976). Analysis of the school preferred reading program in selected Los Angeles minority schools.
• Armor, D. J., Polich, J. M., & Stambul, H. B. (1976). Alcoholism and treatment.
• Polich, J. M., Armor, D. J., & Braiker, H. B. (1980). The course of alcoholism: Four years after treatment. RAND CORP SANTA MONICA CA.
• Rough, J. A., & Armor, D. J. (2017). Sexual assault in the US military: Trends and responses. World Medical & Health Policy, 9(2), 206-224.
• Armor, D. J., Marks, G. N., & Malatinszky, A. (2018). The impact of school SES on student achievement: Evidence from US statewide achievement data. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 40(4), 613-630.