John W. M. Rothney

The Evaluation of Guidance and Personnel Services

As THE GUIDANCE movement enters into its second half-century, there is general recognition of the need for evaluation of its services, but little evidence that the need is being met. Guidance services, like many others in education, are still offered largely on the bases of hope and faith. Cottles statement (8) three years ago about the paucity of, and the great need for, co-operative and better-designed research is as apropos today as it was then.

Chapter VIII: The Evaluation of Guidance and Personnel Services

A s THE GUIDANCE movement enters into its second half-century, there is general recognition of the need for evaluation of its services, but little evidence that the need is being met. Guidance services, like many others in education, are still offered largely on the bases of hope and faith. Cottles statement (8) three years ago about the paucity of, and the great need for, co-operative and better-designed research is as apropos today as it was then. Only three books evaluating guidance services have been published during the 50 years since such services began, and one describing an extensive follow-up appeared during the period under review. (All other reports were brief articles in which the period covered from the application of the guidance service to its evaluation was relatively short.) In that book Rothney (34) described his attempt to assess vocational, educational, and social activities of two groups at six months, two and one-half years, and five years after high-school graduation. The experimental group consisted of 343 subjects who had been counseled and who were compared with 342 members of a control group who had received no special counseling while they were in senior high school. The many findings of the research were summarized in his statement that counseling did 3eem to assist in the accomplishment of the objectives of the American secondary school. General discussions of the need for evaluation of guidance services appeared frequently, and some of them raised issues that should be considered by evaluators. Pattersons discussion (27) of matching versus randomization in studies of counseling merited special attention. Callis, Polmantier, and Roeber (3 ) , in their summary of five years of research on counseling at the University of Missouri, raised some crucial questions. Coleman (6) listed 26 evaluative studies that he thought were needed. Heist (18) , Hall (17) , the Fifty-Eighth Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, Part II (1 ) , and Strang (37) placed evaluation studies high on their lists of researches desirable in guidance.

Development and Applications of Projective Techniques

THE AUTHORS wrote in a REVIEW article three years ago (38) that research with projective techniques presented more of a challenge than research with conventional psychometric methods because there was no clear-cut agreement as to the rationale for the whole process, because it was extremely difficult to find reliable criterion measures, and because there was no common metric. As was indicated, due to these difficulties the researcher with projective methods often failed to employ scientific methods, failed to use control groups, used too few cases, tended to overgeneralize his findings, described his scoring procedures too vaguely, used ill-defined criterion measures, and continued to rework concepts that research had shown to be neither important nor meaningful. It seems to the writers that most of the research reports in the period covered by this review are still limited by such difficulties. One of the leading Rorschachers, Klopfer, described the current situation when he said that there seemed to be a dearth of carefully designed longitudinal studies, and the evaluation of published studies seemed to be a thankless and almost impossible task because of the multiplicity of scoring systems which are not mutually translatable (22). He also charged that findings are so influenced by the researchers choice of method of administration and scoring that any comparison of results seemed almost impossible. Two major critical reports are worth special consideration. Cronbach and Meehl (8) stressed the need to use widespread negative evidence so often found in studies with projective techniques and suggested that these results might contribute in building psychological constructs which would add to the validity of projective techniques as a whole. Lindzey (29) pointed out that one of the factors which contributed to the slight progress made toward an understanding of the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) was an excess of casual empiricism and a scarcity of systematic investigations.

Applications of Personality and Character Measurement

IF THE PERIOD under review has been as prolific in research as the last period covered in the REVIEW OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH the results have not been published. A sort of routine research formula, however, seems to have become common practice-to construct or revise an instrument for the purpose of solving a practical problem, to administer it to one or more groups, and to study by common statistical procedures the scores obtained. Seldom does one come upon the development of an instrument or the utilization of a technic which shows promise of being more rewarding than the rather ineffectual procedures that have been developed in the past. It is probable that the kind of research which has been described for the most part in this chapter has reached its height and will be superseded by other forms of personality study.

Chapter VII: Applications of Personality and Character Measurement

I F THE PERIOD under review has been as prolific in research as the last period covered in the REVIEW OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH the results have not been published. A sort of routine research formula, however, seems to have become common practice—to construct or revise an instrument for the purpose of solving a practical problem, to administer it to one or more groups, and to study by common statistical procedures the scores obtained. Seldom does one come upon the development of an instrument or the utilization of a technic which shows promise of being more rewarding than the rather ineffectual procedures that have been developed in the past. It is probable that the kind of research which has been described for the most part in this chapter has reached its height and will be superseded by other forms of personality study.