Much Ado about Test Standards in Postwar US Psychology

Alexander Kindel, Princeton University

This paper discusses an episode in the history of psychological test validation — the development of construct validity — and reflects upon its relationship to the regulation of technical conduct in the social sciences. I focus in particular on the work of the 1950-1954 APA Committee on Test Standards and its effort to write its 1954 report "Technical Recommendations for Psychological Tests and Diagnostic Techniques"; the report became the basis for the modern notion of construct validity. I analyze the social structure of an encounter between two psychologists — the psychometrician Lee Cronbach, chair of the committee and lead author of the report, and personality psychologist Gordon Allport, a former APA president and professor in the Department of Social Relations at Harvard — and their disagreement over part of an early draft of the report. The arc of Allport and Cronbach’s interaction shows how tensions in professional sociality, particularly around deference to seniority, emerge from a continuously shifting terrain of professional competency. It also shows how midcentury academic organizational tactics secured elites' scholarly reputations and personal prerogatives through the informal management of intraprofessional criticism at a time of rapid expansion.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 135. Contested Values in Fields of Expertise