Child Study

At Clark University, G. Stanley Hall established a graduate program in psychology that attracted students in numbers sufficient to make Clark a leader in psychology after its opening in 1889. In its first decade, 30 of the 54 doctorates in psychology awarded in the period were earned at Clark (White, 1992). In his laboratory of psychology, Hall fostered the experimental methods that he had learned in Germany and appointed E. C. Sanford (1859–1924) to supervise the experimental work. Hall’s primary interest lay in developmental psychology; his recapitulation theory of development reflected the nineteenth-century view that the course of development of an individual parallels the stages of human evolution (Richards, 1992). Thus, “every child, from the moment of conception to maturity, recapitulates, . . . every stage of development through which the human race from its lowest animal beginnings has passed” (Hall, 1923, p. 380). Although the theory was later discredited, it served a useful purpose in stimulating research. In 1891, Hall introduced the use of child-study questionnaires, the “Clark method” (Danziger, 1985, 1990). Questionnaires were designed to investigate “(a) simple automatisms, instincts, and attitudes, (b) the small child’s activities and feelings, (c) control of emotions and will, (d) development of the higher faculties, (e) individual differences, (f) school processes and practices, and (g) church processes and practices” (White, 1992, p. 29). Much of Hall’s research on childhood and that of his students culminated in his two-volume Adolescence (1904). Child psychology was not, however, uniquely the property of Hall and his university. James Mark Baldwin’s Mental Development in the Child and the Race (1895) and its companion volume, Social and Ethical interpretations of Mental Development (1897), were attempts to bring a genetic account of development into the new psychology and “to bridge the gap between the study of social institutions (i.e., sociology) and the study of individual functioning (i.e., psychology)” (Cairns, 1992). Baldwin’s contributions were fleeting, for many reasons (see Cairns, 1992), among which was that his theoretical formulations were out of step with the heavy empirical emphasis prevalent in psychology at the time. Similarly, Hall’s influence was limited by the critical attack from those closely tied to laboratory investigations that his questionnaire research was methodologically weak. Nevertheless, Hall and Baldwin made the psychology of child development and the methods appropriate to its study part of the new psychology.