ABSTRACT
This is not a story about developing any grand psychological theory, more pursuing what Lee Cronbach (1975, p. 126) described as the more reasonable aspiration for the social scientist of assessing local events accurately, “to improve short run control,” and developing explanatory concepts, “concepts that will help people to use their heads.” In other words, our goal should be not only to add to understanding of human development and functioning, but by means of empirical evidence to contribute to their improvement (Lerner, Fisher, & Weinberg, 2000). There is, perhaps, no better way of putting it than the caution from Barbara Wootton (1959):
The last quotation also brings into the frame the names of significant people who have pointed the way to me by moving the subject on. Another such early influence was Hans Eysenck, external examiner for my Bristol first
degree and later for my London Birkbeck College PhD. His popular broadsides against unscientific psychological thinking, as exemplified by psychoanalysis, seemed at the time to be totally laudable correctives (Eysenck, 1953, 1957). It took me some time to recognize that one set of ideational rigidities can too easily be replaced by another closed system of belief of which Eysenck was no exception. Inevitably over a period of 50 years it is a selective picture, but I hope it gives more than just a flavor of the concerns that have dominated my career in social science and adolescent psychology.
