Because the subject matter of psychology pertains to people, research in the field requires interpersonal relating between the scientist and the individuals who comprise their data points. Publications examining these social relationships are ample, but most are constrained by canonical standards of objectivity and political pressures of acceptance by fellow scientists. Rare exceptions to canonical systems of reporting are made, for instance, in memoirs, laboratory notebooks, and interviews. This thesis contributes to the scholarship by using a unique database of anonymous, open-ended, firsthand reports from American psychologists in the 1960s – a transformative period for psychology – to shed light on how midcentury psychologists viewed and described their subjects.
The database contains about 2,500 surviving survey responses collected by the American Psychological Association between 1968 and 1971, when the organization solicited descriptions of its members' ethical dilemmas as part of its effort to empirically create guidelines for ethical research. First-stage qualitative coding employed six subject-related categories to sort mentions of subjects. The \"attributes of subject\" code, containing varied interpretations of subjects, underwent a secondary thematic analysis to identify six common themes in the appraisals' content and disentangle three temporal junctures of the descriptions. A matrix organizes the layered findings of the thematic coding. The analysis reveals overarching refrains: intimate social relating in plentiful inferences of subjects' internal states as well as numerous reflections on the power dynamics of psychological knowledge production.
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