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Escalona and Heider have attempted an imaginative approach to the problem of prediction of behavior and personality. Their study is essentially an effort at measuring the accuracy of the ability of two trained observers to predict the behavior of preschool children on the basis of observations and data of these children at the age of eight months.
The study was not planned at the time the children were first observed, but was initiated later and made possible because of the happy coincidence that a number of children (thirty-one) were involved in two separate and unrelated studies. The first was an Infancy Study designed to evaluate individual differences in infant functioning within a normal range. The second was a Coping Project concerned with nursery school children's efforts to cope with their own problems. Both projects were supported by the Menninger Foundation and the U. S. Public Health Service. They were independently conceived and conducted in the same community (Topeka, Kansas).
Predictions of future behavioral characteristics were not made at the time of the first study but were done later from a review of the records which had been taken on these children during the Infancy Study. These predictions were checked against behavior during the Coping Project. An average of thirty-six predictive items were made for each child. A total of 882 predictions were used. These fell into forty-six content areas. The ratings of the predictions for conformity to observed behavior was done on a five point scale by two judges (the authors).
The authors, whose record as researchers attests to their possession of considerable statistical and psychological sophistication, emphasize that the data do not permit statistical treatment based upon probability theory. Hence they provide none of the usual tests of significance for their data. Nonetheless, the data do lend themselves to numerical analysis and inferences are drawn concerning the basic goal of the study.
The interpretatio