ABSTRACT
This chapter develops several themes that represent things that author have learned about competence in the special Peace Corps setting. First, in regard to the nature of competence in this group, time, and setting: Our data support the view that competence has a coherent core of common psychological attributes. But, second, competent performance takes various forms, which people reach by different psychological routes. Third, in regard to the prediction of competent performance: Two reasonable possibilities, grounded in the respective thought patterns of social psychologists and of psychiatrists and clinical psychologists, turn out not to work at all, while a third predictor, introduced on a hunch, shows promise. The author grasped the opportunity to make a study of a group of promising young people who were faced with a challenging assignment: the first group of Peace Corps volunteers to go overseas, who trained in Berkeley in the summer of 1961 and served for two years as secondary school teachers in Ghana.
