BIOLOGY IN HUMAN AFFAIRS 



Scotch, that is, the foreign English-speaking stocks, of 

 whom 26 per cent were successful. Of the Americans (defin- 

 ing Americans for this purpose as those whose fathers 

 were born in this country) only 19 per cent were successful 

 in this occupation. 



These differences are striking. Instantly there occur many 

 possible explanations, social and educational, as to why 

 American girls in that community prefer to take lower 

 wages working as clerks, than to earn better wages at such 

 factory work as this. Whatever the reasons, here is an 

 instance in which the statistical method applied to familiar 

 data from the application interview, revealed information 

 significant for predicting likelihood of success, thus 

 supplementing the ordinary procedures of hiring and place- 

 ment. Such aids can be employed only when there is a 

 sufficiently large number of employees in a single occupa- 

 tion, and when reliable, clean-cut criteria of success in that 

 occupation are available. Probability tables based on data 

 of this sort have been compiled from their own extensive 

 experience by several firms maintaining large sales organ- 

 izations and by groups of life insurance companies whose 

 expenditures in recruiting and training successful salesmen 

 of life insurance constitute a measurable item of expense 

 to the purchaser. 



It is not only data of the kind described which lend them- 

 selves to useful purposes when gathered carefully and sub- 

 jected to quantitative evaluation. The interest questionnaire 

 or occupational preference blank also is used in this way. 



Somewhat similar approaches to quantitative determi- 

 nation of professional aptitudes are those which resort to 

 the free association experiment and similar sources for 

 data regarding temperament, tastes, and emotional atti- 

 tudes. In this field of inquiry, Kenagy and Yoakum, 

 Freyd, Wells, Laird, and O'Connor may be mentioned as 

 among those who have not neglected the application of 



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