Behavior Settings
The earliest noteworthy discoveries in the field of environmental psychology can be dated back to Roger Barker who created the field of ecological psychology. Founding his research station in Oskaloosa, Kansas in 1947, his field observations expanded into the theory that social settings influence behavior. Empirical data gathered in Oskaloosa from 1947 to 1972 helped him develop the concept of the “behavior setting” to help explain the relationship between the individual and the immediate environment. This was further explored in his work with Paul Gump in the book Big School, Small School: High School Size and Student Behavior. One of the first insightful explanations on why groups tend to be less satisfying for their members as they increase in size, their studies illustrated that large schools had a similar number of behavior settings to that of small schools. This resulted in the students’ ability to presume many different roles in small schools (e.g. be in the school band and the school football team) but in larger schools there was a propensity to deliberate over their social choices.
In his book Ecological Psychology Barker stresses the importance of the town’s behavior and environment as the residents’ most ordinary instrument of describing their environment. “The hybrid, eco-behavioral character of behavior settings appear to present Midwest’s inhabitants with no difficulty; nouns that combine milieu and standing behavior are common, e.g. oyster supper, basketball game, turkey dinner, golden gavel ceremony, cake walk, back surgery, gift exchange, livestock auction, auto repair.”
Barker argued that his students should implement T-methods (psychologist as 'transducer': i.e. methods in which they studied man in his 'natural environment') rather than O-methods (psychologist as "operators" i.e. experimental methods). Basically, Barker preferred fieldwork and direct observation rather than controlled experiments. Some of the minute-by-minute observations of Kansan children from morning to night, jotted down by young and maternal graduate students, may be the most intimate and poignant documents in social science. Barker spent his career expanding on what he called ecological psychology, identifying these behavior settings, and publishing accounts such as One Boy's Day (1952) and Midwest and Its Children (1955.)
Read more about this topic: Environmental Psychology, Concepts
Famous quotes containing the word behavior:
“The inability to control our children’s behavior feels the same as not being able to control it in ourselves. And the fact is that primitive behavior in children does unleash primitive behavior in mothers. That’s what frightens mothers most. For young children, even when out of control, do not have the power to destroy their mothers, but mothers who are out of control feel that they may destroy their children.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)