A Girl's Childhood by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2014-07-29T16:00:00+00:00

6

Archiving the Records of the Longitudinal Study of the Child

DIANE E. KAPLAN

Milton Senn came to Yale University in 1948 as Sterling Professor of Pediatrics and Psychology and as the first director of Yale’s reorganized Child Study Center. Having received his M.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1925, Senn had spent two years as a Commonwealth Fund fellow studying to become a psycho analyst. When he arrived at Yale, he already had an abiding interest in bringing the insights of psychiatry to bear on the health care of children.

By January 1949, Senn had already outlined a program of research on the personality development of children from birth to adolescence. He wanted to study a variety of problems in the field of human behavior stemming from infancy and childhood and to modify practices in child rearing, child care, and education to address some of them. In his outline, he proposed a study that would employ a long-term appraisal of the same group of children beginning with prenatal interviews of parents and continuing through direct observations of children made in infancy, and in nursery, primary, and secondary school. In hopes of receiving outside financial support for this ambitious interdisciplinary study, Senn submitted a two-page proposal to Dr. Katherine Bain at the U.S. Children’s Bureau.1

It would be more than a year before the Yale Child Study Center’s longitudinal study of the child commenced and along with it, the accumulation of a voluminous assortment of records that are now housed in Manuscripts and Archives in the Yale University Library. The archivists at Yale, in trying to understand and describe the materials in their keep, sought to learn about their context and explain why the records were created and the purposes they originally served. Quite often records of projects speak for themselves; they include organizational minutes, plans of work, periodic reports, and the like. This is not the case with the records of the Yale Longitudinal Study of the Child. The records in the Yale Library comprise methodical notes of research observations of study subjects, but surprisingly, the records do not include administrative documents concerning the founding of the study. In order to piece this history together, the archivists were dependent on a small number of documents in personal papers housed at the National Library of Medicine and the Library of Congress as well as a substantial trove of records at the Rockefeller Archives Center.2

In the spring of 1950, Senn learned that the Children’s Bureau would probably not be able to fund his proposal for at least another year, but he continued to develop his ideas for the study in discussions with others at Yale. Among those involved at this formative stage were Ernst Kris, Katherine Wolf, Sally Provence, and Edith B. Jackson. With the exception of Jackson, these participants had come to Yale within a year of Senn’s arrival.3

Edith Banfield Jackson, like Senn, had trained first as a pediatrician, receiving her M.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1921. Jackson held various teaching positions at the Yale University School of Medicine from 1924 to 1929.

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