VII.
The Development of a Method For Collecting the Data in the Primary Area:
Now, let me spell out this latter part. I was in a particular
setting at the time that this
work started where it would have been impossible to carry on any kind of
research outside of the classroom setting in which I was working. I was
carrying at that time 27 hours
and people who know the business know what that is.
{Average
college student – 15 hours / with labs maybe 16-17 / more hours usually
requires counselors or deans or department heads special approval.} Consequently,
it would just have been impossible to do it within the time frame that I
had.
So, I had to find a way of getting my information . . . out of the
subjects in the classroom that I was working with. And – I was teaching
in an all male school, in an all girl school, and in an male-female adult
extension division at that particular time.
I didn’t want people who knew anything, to speak of, about
personality theory and I didn’t want people who were very sophisticated
in psychological knowledge. Some of
you might disagree with me but I will support it even to this day that if
you pick people in the second class in psychology you’ve got a pretty
unsophisticated group for they sure as hell don’t learn anything in the
first class.
I had people in the beginning in a class in each of these schools
which was entitled the theory of normal personality. So I said that I was
going to teach the theory of normal
personality in a manner that would provide the information that I was
seeking. And then I can go on from there.
I utilized in the first phase of the study the students that I had
in my classes of personality.
This particular methodology, which I’m going to detail in a moment, was
repeated eight different times with eight different groups.
How could I get the conception of healthy personality without
lousing up the information
by the students having read outside the class about what I said? How could
I teach at the same time what healthy personality was supposed to be like?
This was essentially
the problem that I was confronted with.
We had a course organization of a fifteen (15) week term consisting
of three (3) five
(5) week terms. Briefly, I went into the classroom on the first day and I
said to the students:
“I do not want you to read a thing during the first five weeks of
this class. I want you
to be no further along than you are at the moment you came in here in
any kind of study of the field of psychology or the field of
personality. We will take the
first five weeks to talk in class about what people would put into a
conception
of
a health personality. What are the things you would get in such a
conception?
And you people will share this information with one another. I will
just be in here seeing
to it that you people stay on the subject of talking about what is a
healthy personality;
what one ought to include when one talks about a health personality in
operation.
As we proceed through these five weeks I want you to think about your
own personal conception of what health personality is . . . and
. . . at the end of
these five weeks present to me your paper on your personal conception
of what
is
the healthy human being, the psychologically healthy human being in
operation.”
We
proceeded in that manner and at the end of the first five weeks I
collected the materials
(unknown to the students and most would not know even to this day in time
that they were ever, at any time in this process, subjects in an
experiment).