Vocational Psychology: Its Problems and Methods Part 5

The reliable vocational psychograph, which proceeds by means of a careful preliminary a.n.a.lysis of the qualities required in the given work, and uses specially adapted tests with reliable norms for their evaluation, is not yet available for any single occupation. The preliminary a.n.a.lyses so far made, whether by employer, psychologist, or engineer, give us little guidance, and until such guidance is forthcoming the special adaptation of tests and the acc.u.mulation of norms and standards cannot make much practical progress. The inadequacy of the a.n.a.lyses already offered should not discourage further effort in this direction. The alignment of the simple industrial processes along the general intelligence scale has already been begun. The description of the more complex tasks in terms of identifiable mental characteristics is a much more difficult task, but this very difficulty is at once a sign of the importance of the problem.

FOOTNOTES:

[6] "Conduct of Mind Series," D. Appleton & Co., New York.

CHAPTER V

SPECIALIZED VOCATIONAL TESTS AND METHODS

The absence of complete vocational psychographs has not r.e.t.a.r.ded the search for tests which, though more or less fragmentary, may have vocational significance. In fact, there are some twenty types of work for which tests have already been proposed, recommended, and more or less tentatively tried out. A brief account of these, with references to the more complete literature, will be given here, and some attempt made to evaluate the tests themselves.

Subst.i.tutes for the vocational psychograph, in the way of partial and suggestive tests, have been proposed in four different forms. Since the work of the immediate future will probably develop along these same lines, these four forms will be indicated here, and typical ill.u.s.trations cited in each case.

A. There is first what may be called the method of the vocational miniature. Here the entire work, or some selected and important part of it, is reproduced on a small scale by using toy apparatus or in some such way duplicating the actual situation which the worker faces when engaged at his task. Thus McComas, in testing telephone operators, constructed a miniature switchboard and put the operators through actual calls and responses, meanwhile measuring their speed and accuracy by means of chronometric attachments. Stern and others recommend tests of the fidelity of report of a witness in court by letting him observe some rehea.r.s.ed scene, some motion picture representation of a series of events, or some pictorial portrayal of a scene or episode, and examining into the faithfulness with which he can describe what he there saw.

B. Closely related to this method of miniature performance is that of taking an actual piece of the work to be performed and sampling the candidate's ability by his success in this trial. Thus, in connection with the recommendation of clerks and a.s.sistants from among the boys in commercial high schools it is common to test their ability from time to time throughout their course by a.s.signing them small pieces of work similar to that which they might later be required to perform in business offices and shops. Finding addresses and numbers in a telephone directory, carrying out involved verbal instructions and directions from memory, computing calculations, recommending action on the basis of their figures, making out a trial balance, a trial chemical a.n.a.lysis, etc., are common forms of this type of test. In certain cases such specimens of work have been devised in or taken into the psychological laboratory and the worker watched more closely and measured more exactly. This has been done, for instance, by Thorndike in the case of clerical workers and salesmen, by Paynter in the case of judges of trade-mark infringements, by Scott in the case of salesmen, and by others in the case of tests for handwriting experts.

C. A third method has been that of a.n.a.logy. Some test is devised which bears real or supposed resemblance to the sort of situation met by the worker in the given occupational activity. The material is new, but the att.i.tude and endeavor of the worker seem to be much the same. There is indeed usually a tacit or expressed belief that the same simple or complex mental processes or psychological functions are involved in the two cases, although the precise nature of this function has seldom been clearly stated. Thus girls employed in sorting steel ball-bearings, and also typesetters, have been selected on the basis of their speed of reaction to a sound stimulus. Munsterberg has suggested that marine officers who can quickly perceive a situation and choose an appropriate mode of reaction to it may be selected by letting candidates sort into their appropriate piles a deck of cards bearing different combinations of letters. The same investigator has described a test for motormen which, while being neither a miniature of their required work nor yet a sample of it, is said to produce in them much the same mental att.i.tude. In another case telephone operators were tested for speed in canceling certain letters from a newspaper page, in the belief that this work involved an ability that was also required at the switchboard, although there directed to different material. McComas has described a dot-striking test for measuring accuracy of aim or motor coordination, which forms an essential factor in manipulating a switchboard.

D. Finally there are cases in which tests having vocational significance have been sought by purely haphazard and empirical ways. Thus Lough, having devised a form of subst.i.tution test in which certain characters had always to be replaced by certain others, according to a prescribed key, then proceeded to apply it to groups of commercial students. Speed of improvement was chosen as the thing of interest in respect to the test.

Measures of this capacity, as shown by repeated trials with the same test day after day, were then compared with measures of ability in different types of work in which the students were engaged. It was found that the test records agreed very closely with the abilities in typewriting, fairly closely with abilities in business correspondence and stenography, whereas there was not such definite relation found between the test records and ability in learning the German language or in mathematics. The test is consequently recommended as a useful means of detecting typewriting and stenographic ability. It is not pretended that the test is a miniature of the work of such calling, nor that it is a fair sample of such work, nor even that it involves precisely the same mental functions that come into play in such work. The test records and ability in the particular type of work show high positive correlation, which means that an individual who is good or medium or poor in the one is, as a mere matter of fact, also found to be good, medium or poor in the other. Hence, without further a.n.a.lysis, the one may be used as the sign of the other.

Another good ill.u.s.tration of the use of this method is the study of Lahy, who put good, average and poor typewriters through a great number of tests of different sorts. He found that the only tests correlating closely with ability in the practical work were those for memory span, tactile and muscular sensibility, sustained attention, and equality of strength in the two hands.

Perhaps the most perfect example of this purely empirical procedure is the investigation which has now been conducted for several years by Mrs.

Woolley and her co-workers in Cincinnati. Children who leave the grades to enter directly into some sort of industrial occupation are examined by a miscellaneous a.s.sortment of simple mental tests. These records are preserved, and the subsequent successes or failures of the pupils in the various sorts of work undertaken by them in later life are as carefully recorded as is possible. It is hoped that when a sufficient amount of material of this nature has been acc.u.mulated the two sets of data may be compared and information thereby secured concerning the relation between ability in the tests and the types and degrees of industrial fitness. At present only the test records have been published.

In a recent investigation an attempt was made to discover, by this empirical method, a set of mental tests which would aid in the selection of efficient workers in a specific field. Thirty workers who were already employed under fairly comparable conditions of work were taken as subjects in a preliminary search for tests of value. These thirty people were each put through a series of "a.s.sociation tests," of the familiar laboratory form, naming opposites, naming colors and forms, completing mutilated pa.s.sages, following hard directions, giving responses bearing specified relations to stimulus words, cancellation and number checking, etc. While these tests were in progress, during a period of several days, the thirty workers were rated by three supervisors who were familiar with their work at the actual task, and who had for some time been observing their performance with a view to making subsequent judgments. Each supervisor arranged the thirty workers in an order of merit, according to his or her impression of their relative efficiency. The judgments of these three supervisors were then averaged and each worker a.s.signed a final position on the basis of these averages. This was believed to be as accurate a measure of actual ability as could be secured under the complex conditions of work.

The results of these ratings were then compared with the results of the mental tests. Some of the tests were found not to correlate with the ratings for actual working efficiency. Three tests showed definite and positive correlations, as follows: _Color-Naming_ (thirty-seven per cent), _Hard Directions_ (forty per cent), _Completion_ (thirty-three per cent).

When results from these three tests were combined, the records correlated with the ratings by a coefficient of fifty-five per cent. These three tests were then accepted as having value in the selection of good operators, and search was continued for further tests which might also yield positive correlations. This investigation is again an ill.u.s.tration of the purely empirical method.

These four procedures in the search for useful vocational tests, in the absence of complete vocational psychographs, are quite generally recognized to be but tentative expedients of an explorative character. Individual workers have not always clearly recognized the principles involved in their work, but have proceeded as best they could under the special circ.u.mstances. Each method has its own defects and advantages. The miniature model has the advantage of concreteness and apparent relevance, but, as Munsterberg points out, "a reduced copy of an external apparatus may arouse ideas, feelings and volitions which have little in common with the processes of actual life." This writer is inclined to believe, on the basis of his experiments so far, that "experiments with small models of the actual industrial mechanism are hardly appropriate for investigations in the field of economic psychology. The essential point for the psychological experiment is not the external similarity of the apparatus, but exclusively the inner similarity of the mental att.i.tude. The more the external mechanism with which or on which the action is carried out becomes schematized, the more the action itself will appear in its true character."

The second method we have described, viz., that of using as the test a real sample of the work done, has certain very obvious advantages. On the other hand, for the vocational test of this type to be at all significant, either the sort of work involved in the occupation must be fairly uniform and h.o.m.ogeneous in all its different circ.u.mstances (as in the case of typewriting at dictation, or in the work of filing clerks, accountants, etc.), or else there must be included a large number of samples representing all the various unrelated sorts of work. Moreover, in neither case is the test in any peculiar sense psychological. Such tests could perhaps be best conducted by the employer himself. In fact, employment on trial, which is a common method of selecting operatives and a.s.sistants, is a time-honored form of this test, which is not necessarily improved either by calling it psychological or by putting it in charge of a general expert or by removing it to the laboratory.

The third form of procedure is full of all sorts of difficulties and sources of error, many of which are, at the present stage of our knowledge, irremediable. In selecting a new test which will involve the same mental att.i.tude and call for the exercise of the same psychological functions as are needed in the work itself, we are handicapped by the unreliability of the introspection of the examinee and also by our inadequate ability to recognize, identify and cla.s.sify psychological functions even when we are confident that these are present. The statement of motormen that the manipulation of a crank in connection with a strip of checkered paper makes them feel quite as they do when guiding their cars through a crowded thoroughfare is far from a guaranty "that the mental function which they were going through had the greatest possible similarity with their experience on the front platform of the electric car." It is much more conceivable that the "mental att.i.tude" referred to was merely the vague feeling that "Something is happening now," "This keeps me busy," or "What a nuisance this thing is." And even if we knew the mental functions involved, as would be demanded by the vocational psychograph method, we are still a long way from the time when we can exhibit even a single psychological test and state just what function or functions its performance does or does not, may or may not, involve. Indeed we do not even know what the various distinct mental functions are, or whether, as a matter of fact, there are such distinct functions.

After all, the miscellaneous, random, and purely empirical method of Lough, Lahy and Woolley seems to be the most promising experimental procedure for the immediate present, and perhaps for some time to come. This method is, to be sure, but a rough, provisional and una.n.a.lyzed expedient. It calls for long and patient cooperative labor. It does not at once afford us the systematic scientific insight which we may wish we possessed. But it will at least save us from the delusion that we already possess such insight, and it should serve to check the fervent and semi-religious zeal that leads us to mistake prophecy for service. a.n.a.lysis and cla.s.sification of the results which this method yields are possible when the results are acc.u.mulated in adequate measure.

It is essential that interest in this eminently practical use of the psychological laboratory be sustained among those who are responsible for the further promotion of its methods and problems. But it is undesirable that public expectation should be strenuously directed toward the laboratory until it has done more than the outlining of a series of problems and the initiation of preliminary efforts toward their solution.

These specialized vocational methods, the miniature, the sampling, the a.n.a.logy, and the empirical procedure, const.i.tute four definite and promising instruments of research. They have yielded results of such demonstrable practical value, in the selection of special types of workers and in the detection of particular apt.i.tudes and abilities, that the application of selected mental tests has already come to play an important role in the placement and training departments of a considerable number of industrial and commercial concerns. While the more slowly developing individual and vocational psychographs are being perfected, these specialized vocational tests will not only serve the purposes of temporary a.s.sistance and expedience, but the results derived from their intelligent use and their further patient elaboration will contribute materially toward the establishment of more complete and systematic technique.[7]

FOOTNOTES:

[7] In the Appendix is given a list of references to books and articles which describe numerous tests worth trying out by the empirical method.

Instructions should be carefully followed so that results may be comparable with those secured by other workers.

CHAPTER VI

SELF-a.n.a.lYSIS AND THE JUDGMENT OF a.s.sOCIATES

THE SELF-a.n.a.lYSIS OF THE INDIVIDUAL

We have now reviewed the vocational efforts of primitive magic, medieval clairvoyance, phrenology, physiognomics, industrial education, the vocational survey, the individual psychograph of genius, the vocational psychograph, the graded scales of intelligence tests, and the four proposed types of specialized vocational tests.

We have yet to consider three further methods available for the purposes of vocational psychology, that of "self-a.n.a.lysis," and that of the "consensus of opinion" of one's a.s.sociates, and that of inferring the characteristics of the individual from his achievement in the work of the school curriculum. In the absence of more reliable ways of determining the capacities, interests and vocational apt.i.tudes of individuals in the past, and whenever there was any question of selection, fitness, or choice, four vague methods have often been followed. (1) Either the individual undertook the first available type of employment, tried it out, and then persevered in it or abandoned it for a trial at some other type of work until a suitable occupation was found; or (2) he continued at the original work and made the most of the results and of the ensuing satisfactions or dissatisfactions; or (3) he felt more or less clearly drawn to some particular occupation because of a keen interest in it or because he believed himself to be particularly likely to succeed in it because of his own a.n.a.lysis of his apt.i.tudes and characteristics; or (4) he consulted friends and a.s.sociates, asking them to advise him on the basis of their impression of his individuality and powers.

The unsatisfactoriness, waste and misery of the first two of these methods are largely responsible for the development of a conscious attempt at the vocational guidance of youth. Perhaps if more use were made of the two remaining methods we should never have been moved to initiate the laborious work called for by the psychographic and the test methods. Not enough critical attention has been given to the methods of self-a.n.a.lysis and to the validity of the judgments pa.s.sed on us by our a.s.sociates. The difficulty encountered when one seeks for information on such questions as the following indicates the desirability of further and closer study of these matters.

1. In the individual's a.n.a.lysis of his own personality, are formal guidance and method needed, is special terminology useful, and the recorded experience of others an aid?

2. If so, what sort of guide or scheme or system may such self-a.n.a.lysis profitably follow?

3. Have such guides to the introspective a.n.a.lysis of the self been formulated, and by whom, where, and when?

4. How reliable and consistent are an individual's judgments of his own characteristics, interests, and apt.i.tudes? Has one any constant tendency to overestimate or underestimate himself?

5. Do the degree of reliability and consistency, and this constant error vary in any way with the individual, with the circ.u.mstances, and with the particular trait that is being estimated?

6. How is the individual's judgment of himself likely to compare with the impression of him which his a.s.sociates form? To what degree does this vary with the individual, the trait, and the a.s.sociates?

7. What relation exists between the individual's opinion of himself and the results of objective measurements of him, such as those afforded by psychological tests? How do the results of tests compare with the judgments of a.s.sociates?

8. Are individuals who themselves possess a given trait in high degree better judges of that trait in themselves or in others than are those who possess the trait in less degree?

9. What intercorrelations exist between the estimates of self and others, when different traits are compared?

10. In the case of people in school, what relations exist between the self-estimate, the estimate of others, and the results of tests, on the one hand, and school standing, academic success, and extra-academic activities?

What relation between these factors and successfulness in later life?

On the first three of these questions I shall indicate in following sections such material as is available, pointing out where the more valuable and detailed information may be found. On the remaining seven questions recorded information is much rarer. Here I shall summarize the available material and shall also present tentative answers based on an original investigation which was conducted for the express purpose of calling more definite attention to the problems, as well as to suggest fruitful methods, and at least make a beginning in the acc.u.mulation of facts concerning these very interesting features of human nature.

There is perhaps no proof required that complete and systematic self-a.n.a.lysis is more desirable than random and undirected introspections, whatever value may be attached to the results of such a.n.a.lysis. Whatever be the purpose of self a.n.a.lysis, it will be the more useful and suggestive the more completely it compa.s.ses the total range of capacities and inclinations. Comparison of different a.n.a.lyses by different individuals should result in a synthesis of traits, an acceptable terminology and a mode of statement better calculated to throw light on individual equipment than is secured by the methods of casual and unguided rumination. So far as possible such a.n.a.lyses should proceed in terms of identifiable, comparable and measurable characteristics rather than by the vague categories of conversation and literary description. Such categories, traits and terminology should be used as will best enable the individual not only to state his own reactions in figures of speech, but also to compare himself with his immediate a.s.sociates and with characters less directly known.

One of the first attempts to draw up a list of fundamental qualities as an aid in the inventory of a given individual's particular nature was made by Professor Cattell in an article concerning the characteristics of men of science. Twenty-four traits are enumerated, as follows:

Physical Health Reasonableness Mental Balance Clearness Intellect Independence Emotions Cooperativeness Will Unselfishness Quickness Kindliness Intensity Cheerfulness Breadth Refinement Energy Integrity Judgment Courage Originality Efficiency Perseverance Leadership

Of this list Thorndike has written: "These elements of manhood or components in mental structure hail from a mixture of psychological theory and general reflection on human behavior. It is regrettable that the list has not been published more widely and used in a variety of connections. It seems probable that these significant nouns may in many cases be paralleled by natural units of mental organization-atoms in the human compound. I venture to suggest also, as at least a provisional principle of organization, the instincts or original tendencies of man as a species, it being my opinion that some of the terms of the above list refer to rather complex concatenations of traits in man's nature which have only the artificial unity of producing some defined result in human life."