Money Matters: Talking about Money in Mid-Century Psychology Research

Abstract

Science, like all enterprises, depends on money.While acknowledging that money is requisite to psychology and often has serious political and practical implications, scarce research has been done on the presence, flow, meanings, and problems of money in psychologists' everyday scientific practices.This project contributes to addressing these gaps by drawing upon a database that offers detailed historical pictures of how actors thought and talked about money in scientific activities.The database consists of the approximately 2,000 surviving responses from American psychologists to an open-ended survey the American Psychological Association (APA) sent to thousands of APA members between 1968 and 1970.The survey, conducted as part of the APA's efforts to create guidelines for the treatment of human subjects, sought empirical data on psychologists' encounters with ethical problems during research.The survey respondents' reports frequently include talk of money, somehow deeming it relevant to research ethics.The survey responses were coded for mentions of money and related terms, and the responses were then recoded using coding categories that identify where and how money was discussed.The findings bring into light the ubiquity of money in psychology's scientific practices of the period and a wide array of ways in which money is tellingly relevant to scientific practices.Analyses identify some interesting and important ways that actors--subjects and psychologists--were perceived in distinctive and sometimes varied ways.

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