Roger Barker
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Roger Garlock Barker (1903 – 1990) was a social scientist, a founder of environmental psychology and a leading figure in the field for decades, perhaps best known for his development of the concept of
behavior settings Behavior settings are theorized entities that help explain the relationship between individuals and the environment - particularly the social environment. This topic is typically indexed under the larger rubric of ecological (or environmental) psy ...
and
staffing theory Staffing theory is a social psychology theory that explores the effects of behavior settings being either understaffed or overstaffed. Understaffing refers to the idea that there are not enough people for what the behavior setting promotes, whereas ...
. He was also a central figure in the development of ecological psychology. Barker earned his
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from
Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...
where his advisor was Walter Richard Miles. In the 1940s, Barker and his associate, Herbert Wright from the
University of Kansas The University of Kansas (KU) is a public research university with its main campus in Lawrence, Kansas, United States, and several satellite campuses, research and educational centers, medical centers, and classes across the state of Kansas. Tw ...
in
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, set up the Midwest Psychological Field Station in the nearby town of Oskaloosa, Kansas, a town of fewer than 2,000 people. Barker's team gathered empirical data in Oskaloosa from 1947 to 1972, consistently disguising the town as "Midwest, Kansas" for publications like ''One Boy's Day'' (1952) and ''Midwest and Its Children'' (1955). Based on this data, Barker first developed the concept of the behavior setting to help explain the interplay between the individual and the immediate environment. Possibly one of the most valuable developments of his work was the examination of the way in which the number and variety of behavior settings remains remarkably constant even as institutions increase in size. This was explored in his seminal work with Paul Gump, ''Big School Small School'' (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964). They showed that large schools had a similar number of behavior settings to small schools. A consequence of this was that students could take many different roles in small schools (e.g. be in the school band and the school football team), while in larger schools there was a greater tendency to be selective. His concept of behavior settings was developed and used by
Val Curtis Valerie Curtis (20 September 1958 – 19 October 2020) was a British scientist who was Director of the Environmental Health Group at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. This is a multidisciplinary group dedicated to improving hy ...
since it allows prediction of individual behaviour from the setting in which people find themselves. Barker died at his home in Oskaloosa in September 1990. He was survived by his wife, Louise Shedd Barker, with whom he collaborated on much of his research. Barker is the subject of a 2014 biography — ''The Outsider: The Life and Times of Roger Barker'' — by the award-winning American journalist Ariel Sabar.


References


External links


''This American Life'' story on Barker's Oskaloosa study
1903 births 1990 deaths 20th-century American psychologists Environmental psychologists Systems psychologists People from Madison County, Iowa People from Oskaloosa, Kansas {{US-psychologist-stub