Midwest and Its Children: The Psychological Ecology of an American Town

Psychological ecology is the study of behavior and its psychological habitat as they occur in natural settings, without experimental manipulation. Barker and Wright state they chose 'to make a purely psychological approach' to the study of human behavior in its natural psychological habitat, deliberately ignoring what social anthropologists and sociologists had learned about communal settings . August Hollingshead's review noted this decision meant they carried 'a heavy burden of intra-professional chauvinism' and were forced to develop their own conceptions and recording methods . The approach was psychological 'in a narrow, intra-professional sense,' with only psychologists employed on the study .

Barker and Wright found their sampling of individual child behavior improved when they sampled across divergent places—drug store, Sunday school, 4-H Club meeting, football game—rather than only by age, sex, and social class . They discovered that 'unique and regularly occurring standing patterns of behavior were characteristic of such behavior areas and that they endured despite sometimes frequent turnover of the particular persons involved' . These 'extra-individual wave patterns of behavior,' tied to particular parts of the physical-temporal-geographic environment, became the behavior setting. The discovery solved a sampling problem by revealing that the environment itself, not just the individual, provided the lawful structure needed for description.

Hollingshead's review in the American Sociological Review found the book 'unfinished,' citing a twenty-page list of 585 behavior setting items introduced with a cryptic comment and ending without any analysis or comment . He noted the data were 'not articulated' with the psychological habitats where inhabitants behave, nor were observed behaviors related to their social and cultural habitats. Solomon Axelrad's review in the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry concluded the book offers 'few substantive rewards and little methodological advance,' with raw protocols 'more informative and more interesting than the conclusions drawn from them' .

Barker founded the Midwest Psychological Field Station in Oskaloosa, Kansas, in 1947, a town of fewer than 2,000 people . Barker's team gathered empirical data there until 1972, consistently disguising the town as 'Midwest, Kansas' to protect residents' privacy . The study reported data from a community of 721 inhabitants, with daylong specimen records of children under 11 and a complete behavior setting survey of the town . Comparative data were also collected on children at the Lawton School for Crippled Children in a neighboring city .

Alfred Baldwin's review in Contemporary Psychology acknowledged the authors pictured their role 'as that of the naturalist who collects and describes specimens in theoretically neutral terms' . He found the research 'a tremendous job of empirical description' and credited it with developing 'theoretical concepts for describing a psychological habitat.' But he remained unconvinced it demonstrated the values of ecological research, doubting 'the adequacy with which Midwest and its children have been described' . Nehemiah Jordan defended the book against Baldwin's review, arguing Baldwin 'does the book a great injustice' and that it contains 'much more in the way of analysis and interpretation' than Baldwin acknowledged .

One Boy's Day (1951) presented a single specimen record—a minute-by-minute account of one child's fourteen waking hours—without interpretive framework. Midwest and Its Children (1955) is the first major research report from the field station, incorporating specimen records of multiple children and, crucially, the behavior setting survey method . Baldwin's review noted the later book was 'more of the same as the authors' earlier publication, but it has in it much more in the way of analysis and interpretation' . The 1955 volume thus transformed the specimen method into a systematic ecological approach.