IX.
The Basic Data Produced at this Date as a Result of the Design was:
1.
A phenomenal view of certain beliefs of the subjects - - -
-
- beliefs as to the nature of psychologically healthy behavior.
2.
Reactions of the subjects to peer criticism as
shown in the defense or modification of the conception they produced.
3.
Interaction and reaction of subjects when under peer
criticism as observed unbeknown to subjects through one way mirrors and
an inter-communication system.
4.
Relation to confrontation with authority as shown in the
second
conception
defense or modification.
5.
Some interview data from discussions with randomly
selected subjects after
their primary experiences related to the development of and two rewrites
of their original conception. I just sat down and talked to them about
the changes that they had made; as to why they changed their conception.
This was in order to recheck the basic data.
-
At this point I had three different sets of data.
1) The very basic data – the original conceptions.
2)
The modification and defense under peer pressure.
3)
The modification and defense under influence of authority.
X.
Processing of the Data: Independent judges classified conceptions:
I took the original conceptions and got a group of people who
were
entirely
independent of the study. I handed them the original
conceptions
and gave them a very simple instruction:
“Classify
these papers, if you can, in any way.” . . . and that is all I said.
I used different judges – each year – for all the years of
the collecting of the data. Each
group of judges classified all the data that I had collected up to and
including the year in which they were classifying. This was an
accumulating process. In the first run through the data, the first year,
the judges came up with two major classifications of healthy
personality, (2) categories with two (2) subtypes each. They said over
60% of the original material could be classified into - either health is
denying or sacrificing the self – or health is expressing the self.
There were these two.
This
turns out to repeat itself without question in each of the subsequent
years of the investigation. In each of the following years of
classifying the data the next group of judges came up with the same
classification. At no time did any of the judges know anything
about the classification that other judges had made in the past years.
Yet, every classification processed came up with basically the same
pattern, either a deny/sacrifice self or express self categories.
I knew at this point that the research that I was conducting was
producing something meaningful . . . . was going somewhere . . . . but
where it was taking me was
still a mystery.