Vocational Psychology: Its Problems and Methods — John Shaqi
Vocational Psychology: Its Problems and MethodsHollingworth, Harry L. (Harry Levi)
Science
Vocational Psychology: Its Problems and Methods
Hollingworth, Harry L. (Harry Levi)
Psychophysiology
The chief value of this examination of Poincare does not lie in the
particular results which it yielded, but in its initiation of such attempts
to study in a more or less intimate and intensive way the psychological
processes and type of individuals of marked achievement in special lines of
work. For the purposes of vocational psychology it would be valuable to
know the ways in which such admittedly superior individuals as those now
being studied by Dr. Toulouse, differing as they do in their types of
achievement, would react to the simple and complex tests now employed by
those interested in the measurement of intelligence and special aptitudes.
It is true that these psychographic methods do not yet yield results which
are sufficient to inform us why the particular individuals examined were so
much more successful in their work than were others who seem to have been
equally favored and equally diligent. Nor have they yet revealed in any
adequate way the nature or degree of the qualifications requisite for
success in the vocations from which the representative men have been
selected. Nevertheless the individual psychograph constitutes a suggestive
method of research for the vocational psychology of the future. It
represents the intensive development of the older type of "biography,"
based on direct observational data rather than on hearsay, conjecture and
anecdote.
It is on some variation of this method that we must largely rely in our
efforts to learn to what degree vocational success depends on the presence
of demonstrable personal characteristics, rather than on the accidents of
time, place and circumstance. It was inevitable that the first attempts to
give psychographic accounts of the personality of individuals of genius
should be more or less fragmentary, incomplete and experimental. This has
been due partly to the rapidity with which our knowledge of mental tests
has developed, and partly to the very complex and subtle types of
achievement toward which these early psychographic methods have been
directed. Various investigations are now under way in which these same
methods are being used in the intensive examination of individuals who have
engaged in simpler and more common forms of activity, with varying degrees
of success. In some of these researches, for example, men who have made
their life work the marketing of a specific type of commodity through
direct and personal salesmanship are being submitted to intensive
psychological examinations. The problem is to discover whether there is a
more or less specific and recognizable type of personality which
characterizes the successful salesman and differentiates him from the
mediocre salesman and the utter failure. Directed toward these more
familiar and more easily accessible occupations, the individual psychograph
constitutes one of the most interesting forms of vocational psychology.
Closely related to it, though sufficiently distinct in aim and method to
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