http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/867233134

The prediction of personal adjustment A survey of logical problems and research techniques, with illustrative application to problems of vocational selection, school success, marriage, and crime

"This monograph represents a survey of the logical problems involved in the prediction of human adjustment, with a critical consideration of basic research techniques, new and old, and with illustrative applications to the problems of vocational selection, school success, marriage, and crime. Three considerations converged to make this task seem especially timely. First, a considerable stream of new quantitative theory, as illustrated by factor analysis in psychology, has recently opened new vistas of possibilities for the improvement of instruments of measurement and the discovery of factors important in the prediction of human adjustment. Some of this new mathematical work, seemingly remote from problems of prediction, turns out to have implications which will freshen the whole approach to the prediction problem. Second, new inventions in mechanical tabulation now make possible economical statistical operations which would have been prohibitively costly a decade ago. The influence on psychology and the social sciences of new devices in mechanical tabulation parallels the influence of new mathematical techniques. Third, recent efforts to make more explicit the operations which actually go on in "intuitively sizing up people" in informal interviews and, in general, in the case study methods of research have demonstrated the urgent need of linking more closely quantitative and nonquantitative methods for improving the value and accuracy of predictions. A timely aspect of this study grows out of the need of the national defense program for a rigorous reexamination of fundamental prediction problems in the vocational field by experts freed from immediate administrative responsibilities who could bring their experience to a focus in an atmosphere of relative detachment. The monograph is in two parts. Part I is devoted to a systematic discussion and analysis of the prediction problem. It also contains, at the end, a memorandum on Prediction and National Defense. Part II comprises a number of supplementary studies, several of which make new contributions of theory and technique. While the presentation of a comprehensive bibliography, which would run into thousands of titles, was beyond the scope of the monograph, an intensive study of a considerable body of the literature was made and a special search was made for concrete illustrations of certain of the more crucial methodological points"--Foreword. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved).

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