Leo Srole

Leo Srole (8 October 1908 to 1 May 1993) was an American sociologist, born and raised in Chicago, the son of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants. He took his bachelor's degree at Harvard in 1933, worked with W. Lloyd Warner and Eliot Chapple, and completed his PhD at the University of Chicago under Warner's supervision in 1940. After teaching at New York University and at Hobart and William Smith Colleges he served the United States Army as a military psychologist from 1943 to 1945, taught at the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center from 1951 to 1965, and was on the faculty of Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute until he retired in 1988. He conducted the Midtown Manhattan Study, published in 1962, a landmark survey of the mental health of 1,660 New York City residents which found that fewer than 20 percent were in good mental health, a result that was first doubted and later accepted by other researchers.