ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a brief history of self-observation in early American psychology, largely as it occurred outside of the confines of the psychological laboratory. It focuses on self-observation as undertaken through self-report measures, which served as a means of undertaking self-observational research en masse. The chapter also describes the move from open-ended, self-report questionnaires in the late nineteenth century to more structured, scaled measures in the early twentieth century United States. It discusses the British influence on early American psychology’s methodology through the work of Sir Francis Galton and the mass data collection projects undertaken by psychical researchers. The chapter provides to the extensive program of questionnaire-based research undertaken by Granville Stanley Hall from the late nineteenth into the twentieth century, much of it conducted on the topic of childhood and carried out in educational settings. The self-report-based research conducted in American psychology in the late nineteenth century was largely of a descriptive nature.
