Rodney R. Baker and Wade E. Pickren. Psychology and the Department of Veterans Affairs: A Historical Analysis of Training, Research, Practice, and Advocacy. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2007. 184 pp. $59 (cloth). ISBN 1-59147-453-1
✍ Scribed by Ingrid G. Farreras
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2008
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 260 KB
- Volume
- 44
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0022-5061
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Sociologists of the National University of Ireland, Galway, have done a service to the anthropological and sociological communities by reprinting this facsimile of a classic long out of print. The work was part of a wider Harvard Irish Study, carried out from 1931-1936; it became a classic for both its data and their interpretation, and its methods. The authors of the new introduction have done considerable research to place it in its historical context, describing how the study originated in Lloyd Warner's program of work and how it related to the other parts of the Irish Study, and showing the process of the negotiation needed to establish access and to choose a particular community to study. It is also placed in the theoretical context of the time, and the contemporary meanings it had are related to that. It is suggested that Arensberg and Kimball's version of functionalism, and their aim of producing a case study to contribute to an objective worldwide classification of societies, with the terminology they used to describe them, did not have the significance later imputed to them; some modern interpretations and critical comments have rested on misunderstandings due to lack of knowledge of the intellectual setting. Byrne, Edmondson, and Varley show, too, how the work has been interpreted and used by Irish authors in relation to Irish concerns. The study's validity as a benchmark of the traditional, with which the modern can be contrasted, has been hotly debated; arguments in this debate are briefly reviewed. The book is nicely produced, including numbers of historic photographs.
The new introduction is a model of how past work can usefully be placed in its historical context, and adds to this important original text case-study material of wider interest to the historian of social science. Social science research libraries will want a copy of this book.