Effect of Council on Books in Wartime’s Program on Homesickness and Stress in WWII Servicemen

Abstract

Bibliotherapy, the therapeutic use of reading, was introduced to the U.S Military in World War II by the Council on Books in Wartime, a non-profit organization who sent millions of books to deployed servicemen. Since its effectiveness was never examined, the military’s use of bibliotherapy ended with the war. Therefore, this study focused on analyzing the effect of the Council on Books in Wartime's book contributions upon homesickness and stress in deployed servicemen in WWII. The findings would evaluate the effectiveness of reading as a tool to mitigate homesickness and stress, two factors which heavily impact the mental wellbeing of deployed servicemen and women. To conduct this study, a retrospective correlational case study was conducted on a sample of eight WWII veterans, two of which reported reading while six reported never reading during their service. Each veteran was interviewed with questions derived from the Utrecht Homesickness Scale and the Perceived Stress Scale to quantify the change between both variables after reading. The data was disaggregated for those who did read and those who did not and further disaggregated into early-deployment and late deployment (or pre-reading and post-reading). After conducting the interviews, it was found that the difference between the change in both groups (those who did read and those who did not) was statistically significant for both homesickness and stress. Although there are a number of limitations to the results of this study, the data does suggest that there is a negative correlation between reading and homesickness and stress.