The History Corner:Want to Do Some Historical Research? October 2007

Conducting I-O history research is both difficult and easy. The easy part is picking a topic as there has been relatively little research on our field’s history relative to the vast number of topics that could be researched. For example, although there has been a lot of research conducted on the founding fathers of the field, such as Hugo Münsterberg, Walter Van Dyke Bingham, and Walter Dill Scott, there has been little research on the second generation of applied psychologists. Picking an unresearched or underresearched topic is the easy part. The difficult part is getting started, once you have picked a topic. Conducting historical research is difficult because to evaluate information critically, it is important to understand the historical context that surrounds the event or person that you are studying. For example, understanding the beginnings of applied psychology are impossible if you do not understand the importance the role World War I played, as well as the economic context (e.g., rapid industrialization and violent labor strikes) in addition to the intellectual context (e.g., rapid flowering of many different schools of thought in psychology and the social sciences). In this article, I provide some places for novice historical researchers to start.

The Koppes Book

Until this year, there were no books that provided a complete look on the history of applied psychology. Fortunately, Laura Koppes’s edited volume Historical Perspectives in Industrial and Organizational Psychology came out this year. This is a tremendous resource that should be the first stopping point for anybody who is interested in the history of our field. There are overview chapters, as well as chapters that focus on the history of particular topics such as selection, job analysis, motivation, and leadership. In addition, there is a list of historical resources that would provide a nice next step for students of history. This book is the best place to start for anybody who wants to understand the beginnings of our field.

Original Textbooks

The next step I would recommend is to read some of the original textbooks of the field. These should be readily attainable if you have access to interlibrary loan systems. Alternatively, you can buy your own copies of many of these books for relatively cheap prices at used book Web sites such as www.amazon.com or www.abebooks.com. Hugo Münsterberg’s Psychology and Industrial Efficiency published in 1913 and Morris Viteles’s Industrial Psychology published in 1932 would be the two with which I recommend you start. These books will provide you with a sense of the field in its early days, written from the perspectives of two of the most important figures in the field.

Original Journal Articles

Next, I would recommend reading articles from the early days of some of the important journals in the field. Just like now, the Journal of Applied Psychology, founded in 1917, published much of the most important research of the field. Another journal that I have found really useful is the Personnel Journal, first published in 1922 by the Personnel Research Foundation, a group founded by Walter Van Dyke Bingham and industry and labor leaders to promote discussion of personnel management techniques. The latter journal is interesting to read in that there are research articles as well as many articles written by practitioners on topics related to selection testing, performance evaluation, labor negotiations, and the like. Reading the original articles helps provide a sense of the spirit of the times that is difficult to get when reading historical summaries.

Visit Archives

Once you have picked a topic, visiting archives can provide valuable historical insight that you will not get in historical summaries. The premier archive for psychology research is the Archives of the History of American Psychology located at the University of Akron. This archive is the resting place for papers from a large number of important figures in psychology (as well as the SIOP archives), including many important names in applied psychology. The staff is extremely friendly and encouraging of all researchers. I recommend visiting their Web site that lists the collections that they currently hold: http://www.uakron.edu/ahap/.

Besides the Akron archives, there are important archives held around the country related to individual psychologists. The Bingham Archives at Carnegie Mellon Libraries holds the papers of Walter Van Dyke Bingham as well as many documents related to the founding of the first industrial psychology program at Carnegie Tech. Walter Dill Scott’s papers are held at Northwestern University and Hugo Münsterberg’s at the Boston Public Library. Information on individual psychologists is often held at university archives located at the places they were employed.

There really is no substitute for archival research. I have discovered many gems while digging through archives. For example, while at the Wayne State Archives researching Arthur Kornhauser, I found a memo from the late 1940s sent from the Dean to Kornhauser who was at Columbia being courted to Wayne. Kornhauser, an unabashed liberal advocate for civil liberties, was advised by the Dean that he did not need to answer the question on the application blank that asked if he “swore loyalty to the United States.” The Dean suspected that Kornhauser, out of protest to the red-baiting hysteria spreading throughout the country, might have answered no out of protest. Apparently, no answer was better than a negative one!

Oral Histories

Finally, I recommend that you interview our predecessors in the field. Interviewing aging I-O psychologists can provide you additional perspective on historical events and allows one to ask direct questions that you might not be able to have answered when looking through archives and other historical material. SIOP has been sponsoring an oral history project in an effort to document the lives of aging I-O psychologists. We have sample interview guides, suggestions, and even provide help with transcribing interviews. If you are at all interested in conducting oral history research, please contact the current SIOP Historian Scott Highhouse (shighho@bgsu.edu) and he will set you up.

Conclusions

Good luck in conducting your own historical research! There are many important topics that deserve historical investigation. I hope this article provides you some suggestions on where to go.

References

     Koppes, L. L. (ed.). (2007). Historical perspectives in industrial and organizational psychology. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
     Munsterberg, H. (1913). Psychology and industrial efficiency. Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin.
     Viteles, M. S. (1932). Industrial psychology. New York: Norton.