Archiving the Records of the Longitudinal Study of the Child
Milton Senn came to Yale University in 1948 as Sterling Professor of Pediatrics and Psychology and as the first director of Yale’s reorganized Child Study Center. Having received his M.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1925, Senn had spent two years as a Commonwealth Fund fellow studying to become a psycho analyst. When he arrived at Yale, he already had an abiding interest in bringing the insights of psychiatry to bear on the health care of children.
By January 1949, Senn had already outlined a program of research on the personality development of children from birth to adolescence. He wanted to study a variety of problems in the field of human behavior stemming from infancy and childhood and to modify practices in child rearing, child care, and education to address some of them. In his outline, he proposed a study that would employ a long-term appraisal of the same group of children beginning with prenatal interviews of parents and continuing through direct observations of children made in infancy, and in nursery, primary, and secondary school. In hopes of receiving outside financial support for this ambitious interdisciplinary study, Senn submitted a two-page proposal to Dr. Katherine Bain at the U.S. Children’s Bureau.1
It would be more than a year before the Yale Child Study Center’s longitudinal study of the child commenced and along with it, the accumulation of a voluminous assortment of records that are now housed in Manuscripts and Archives in the Yale University Library. The archivists at Yale, in trying to understand and describe the materials in their keep, sought to learn about their context and explain why the records were created and the purposes they originally served. Quite often records of projects speak for themselves; they include organizational minutes, plans of work, periodic reports, and the like. This is not the case with the records of the Yale Longitudinal Study of the Child. The records in the Yale Library comprise methodical notes of research observations of study subjects, but surprisingly, the records do not include administrative documents concerning the founding of the study. In order to piece this history together, the archivists were dependent on a small number of documents in personal papers housed at the National Library of Medicine and the Library of Congress as well as a substantial trove of records at the Rockefeller Archives Center.2
In the spring of 1950, Senn learned that the Children’s Bureau would probably not be able to fund his proposal for at least another year, but he continued to develop his ideas for the study in discussions with others at Yale. Among those involved at this formative stage were Ernst Kris, Katherine Wolf, Sally Provence, and Edith B. Jackson. With the exception of Jackson, these participants had come to Yale within a year of Senn’s arrival.3
Edith Banfield Jackson, like Senn, had trained first as a pediatrician, receiving her M.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1921. Jackson held various teaching positions at the Yale University School of Medicine from 1924 to 1929. After a brief hiatus in which she underwent training and analysis with Sigmund Freud, she returned to Yale in 1936 as a professor in pediatrics and psychiatry. She was a pioneer in family-centered maternity and infant care and parent-infant bonding and is best known for her work on the Yale Rooming-in Research Project, which she directed from 1946 to 1952. She developed the rooming-in plan to allow parents to have an increased role in the care of their newborn children within hospitals.
In 1949, Ernst Kris received an appointment as a lecturer in psychology at the Yale Child Study Center. Kris had worked with Freud and had become a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1927. From 1930 until 1938, when he fled from Austria, he was a member of the faculty and a training analyst at the Institute of Psychoanalysis in Vienna. He escaped to England where he was a lecturer at the London Institute of Psychoanalysis. He came to the United States in 1940 and joined the New School for Social Research. During World War II, he was also a lecturer at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and the City College of New York. In 1945, he helped found the journal The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child.
Katherine Maria Wolf received her Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Vienna in 1930. Between 1930 and 1938 she was a research associate there, working with Charlotte Buhler and Hildegard Hetzer. One of her early achievements was to aid in the development and standardization of the Viennese developmental scales for the first year of life. After the outbreak of war in 1939, she relocated to Geneva, where she studied sociology and worked with Jean Piaget. She emigrated to the United States in 1941 with her companion, Annemarie Leutzendorf. In New York, Wolf taught graduate psychology at the City College of New York. In 1949, she was invited to lecture on a regular basis at the Yale Child Study Center.
The youngest among the four, Sally Provence, was born in East Texas in 1916. She completed her undergraduate work at Mary Hardin College and received her M.D. from Baylor Medical College. As a practicing pediatrician, Provence became interested in child development and in 1949, she began to work in the Yale Child Study Center.
Kris realized the opportunities that Jackson’s rooming-in project provided. It was already collecting data on the personality of expectant parents and on the early relationship between mother and child. The project staff could contribute the benefit of its experience and data on cases. While the rooming-in project limited its focus to the infancy period, however, the proposed child study project would be directed to the collection of material for a longer-range study. In order to proceed, additional families would have to be recruited. Given the projected length of the study, new services beyond those required in infancy would also be required.4
It is not clear from the documentary evidence when Senn decided to submit his more robust proposal for the study to funding sources other than the U.S. Children’s Bureau, but by April 1950, Dr. Charles Warren of the Commonwealth Fund had reviewed Senn’s idea. In a memo, Warren recorded that he had met with Senn to discuss “a research program which he [Senn] has been organizing in his mind for some time. He said that the focus of it would be on the problems of child rearing and child care and how to improve them. He said that parents’ ‘emotional blocks’ make for difficulty in the optimal handling of their children, and he is anxious to study these and find out how to relieve them.”5
Senn’s early thinking about the study, which reflects his experience as both a pediatrician and a psychoanalyst, is recorded in a May 3, 1950, letter to Dr. Lester J. Evans at the Commonwealth Fund, following a visit that Evans made to New Haven. Senn wrote,
There is yet no science of child development or child rearing. Scientists working in the fields of psychology, anthropology, sociology and medicine are aware of the lack of validated data. . . . It is the aim of the Child Study Center to carry on research in this field, with a continued interest in the methods of training professional people so that they might practice in an effective fashion the knowledge brought to them through research. . . . If parents and professional people ever had a body of facts which might lead to what has been called a science of child rearing, there would be available to the parents serviceable information on how to treat the child.6
Senn elaborated on what needed to be studied: “infant feeding, scheduling versus non-scheduling, training for cleanliness, methods of dealing with aggression, and interpretation of the anxieties and frustrations involved in growth” in order for there to be fewer behavioral difficulties confronting parents and professionals.7
The Commonwealth Fund leadership was obviously impressed with Senn and his ideas.8 In June 1950, Senn received more than $37,000 from the fund for a one-year pilot study, chiefly methodological, with the understanding that he could come back with a proposal for a longer term of support. The post–World War II optimism about the potential of science to improve the lives of individuals is reflected in a response to Senn’s initial conversation with the Commonwealth Fund: “They [Senn and his colleagues] have the hypothesis that certain behavior disturbances can be predicted if enough is known about the attitudes and emotions of the parents. His idea, further, is that with such information these disturbances can be prevented. . . . He thinks that somehow a reasonable amount of preventive therapy can be combined with objective observations on the attitudes and behavior of the parents and children without jeopardizing the validity of the study.”9 That is, Senn saw this research as being interdisciplinary, with social science joining medicine in the service of research in child development.
In its original conception, the children were to be followed through their first five years of life, ending when each child began attending regular school. In fact, however, the study commenced with a focus on the pregnant women and their husbands, including their feelings about pregnancy and attitudes about child care and childrearing. Each parent was to “be interviewed separately for as many times as possible, beginning as early in the pregnancy as one may” in hopes that understanding the “emotional climate or the life-space of the parent-child unit (family)” would lead to a construction of personality types and the ability to predict certain kinds of infant behavior “in eating, sleeping, social behavior, learning difficulties, anxieties etc.”10
Senn was overly optimistic about the number of families that the study could follow: “It is contemplated that from three to five new cases monthly would constitute a caseload that could be followed without too much difficulty (ie. 36–40 cases yearly). Whether this number should be increased would depend on the volume of work entailed in the follow-up in the succeeding years of the study.” He then projected a cost of $33,500, mostly to cover the costs of three and a half staff positions needed for the first two years of the research.11
In July 1950, the researchers began recruiting expectant mothers as potential participants. They may have been piggybacking on the recruiting efforts still under way for the Rooming-in Project. The mothers were to be white, married, between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five, expecting their first child, and having no severe physical or mental health complaints. The recruiters also looked for mothers who expected to live in the New Haven vicinity for several years. Initially, they succeeded in attracting twenty-two families.
In the first year, as planned, the project staff interviewed expectant mothers, though they had less success getting fathers involved in the interviewing process. In this first phase of the project, Charlotte del Solar, a psychologist, and social workers Jeanette Mohr and Laura Codling did the initial interviewing, and the accumulation of data on the families began. The investigators interviewed the expectant parents, focusing on their feelings and attitudes about pregnancy, child care, and childrearing. Before the birth, a researcher interviewed the mothers several times. Along with standard demographic queries, mothers were asked about their family history, relation to people currently in their environment, attitude toward pregnancy, expectations about their future child, and their plans for child care. Most mothers were given psychological tests.
The second phase began when the first child was born in January 1951. This phase focused on the child until he or she entered nursery school. Observers were with the mother during delivery to record her feelings. Pediatricians Sally Provence or Rose Coleman were present at the delivery and submitted detailed reports of the newborn’s first medical examination. Katherine Wolf observed the newborns twice daily for periods of about five minutes. She believed that only in the first few weeks after birth was it possible to distinguish clearly between constitutional and environmental factors that affect a child’s development.
Over the following months, the social workers visited the home at approximately six-week intervals to continue the dialogue about child care and parenting begun in the prenatal period, to observe the physical home environment, and to meet other family members, including extended kin. The pediatricians saw both mother and child at well-baby clinics, administered tests at regular intervals to assess the child’s general developmental level, and visited the home when the children were sick. The pediatrician thus became an observer of the child and family and would continue to assess the child’s maturation and development. This phase of the project ended when the children turned two.
The Commonwealth Fund, pleased by the talent of the assembled staff and the progress of the research, continued to underwrite the costs of the project with an additional grant of $67,410 in May 1952 and $5,000 in May 1953. All the observations and note-taking generated a tremendous amount of data. The time-consuming process of indexing, coding, and sorting this data led to a backlog of material, and by early 1952 the study researchers had decided to admit no new families. Already in the first year, the project staff realized that they could not keep up with the original plan of bringing in three new cases each month. They would only add children to the study by following births of siblings.
When in the third year the children entered the Yale Child Study nursery school they were observed by psychoanalysts and nursery school teachers, as well as pediatricians during periodic examinations in the well-baby clinic. From ages three to five the children were also seen by an analyst in the therapy room. The analysts also initiated individual exploratory play contacts. Originally intended for purposes of observation and exploration, in some instances these interactions became therapy and child analysis sessions as well. The team studied three children intensively through play therapy and via interviews three times a week by a child psychiatrist. Three other children were studied somewhat less intensively through one session with a psychiatrist every other week. Ernst Kris was principally in charge of this phase of the work.
Kris convened weekly staff conferences to review the collected data. Kris would lead these discussions, which all members of the research team attended, when he came to New Haven from his home in Stamford, Connecticut. Later Kris would also host Friday evening meetings in his home to discuss the psychoanalytic treatment of specific children. Study staff members were anxious to establish the relationship between the observational data and the interview materials. The unique aspect of their analysis of the children’s behavior and emotional adjustment was that it could be compared not to the parents’ recollections of their children’s early behavior, but with their early development as observed by the pediatricians and others on the research team.
Although the longitudinal study was a group endeavor (with all data considered, correlated, and analyzed by the group), it became increasingly apparent to the members of the research staff that their interests, which were oriented toward psychoanalysis, child psychology, or sociology, were so divergent that a division of the study would prove more fruitful. In July 1953, they agreed to officially divide into independent investigations. One group, led by Katherine Wolf, would study personality development through the prenatal, neonatal, and infant stages. Another team, composed of Al Wesson, John Mabry, and Jeanette Mohr, planned to analyze the data to understand the process of integration of the firstborn child into the family. The Kris group, the third and most successful group, focused on later personality development. The researchers in this section, who were psychiatrists, pediatricians, social workers, and nursery school teachers, were to study the emotional behavior of the children in their relationships with mothers and others in situations in which anxiety, aggression, withdrawal, and various types of defensive behavior would be observable.12
If one searches the bibliographic databases, one can find any number of books, chapters, journal articles, and papers attributed to Ernst Kris and those who worked with him (Marianne Kris, Rose Coleman Lipton, Sally Provence, and Samuel Ritvo) on the data that covered the children through their first five years. The research by the other two investigative teams was never published.
For her team, Wolf invited two postgraduate students in psychology, Martin Kohn and William Kessen, to assist her in analyzing the collected data. One of Wolf’s major contributions to the study was her method for systematic and exhaustive observation of the mother and newborn. She developed an ingenious system of “motor shorthand” with sketches, to record the range and intensity of the infant’s activity. She described her research as the study of overt manifestations of the basic physical and psychological equipment of infants.13
Wolf detoured into a content analysis of the voluminous interview material on the mothers during pregnancy. She intended to publish two volumes: one a study of ten mothers during the prenatal period, and the other an analysis based on the neonatal observation of the infants. By the end of 1956, she had submitted for review a manuscript of the first volume, which included lengthy biographies of the ten babies. The reviewers’ comments on the manuscript, tentatively entitled “Origin of Individuality: Evaluative Observations on Ten Children in Their First Two Years,” were mixed, and Wolf did not have time to address them before her untimely death on September 15, 1957. Although several junior members of the research team expressed interest in finishing the book in the years following, this part of the study ultimately languished. Wolf’s notes and manuscripts were preserved by a member of the team and donated to Manuscripts and Archives.
In reading the data to understand how a firstborn child was integrated into a family, the team of sociologists Wesson and Mabry and social worker Mohr looked at family background, the emotional atmosphere in the home, environmental happenings, parents’ experiences, their childrearing practices, and information regarding the child’s activities. Their efforts to analyze the interviews and observations made during the first two years of life were slowed when Mohr left New Haven in 1954 to accept a position as a professor in the Simmons College School of Social Work. Work proceeded through correspondence and occasional visits. Wesson had a full teaching load and the analysis and writing fell to Mabry, who apparently left Yale by the fall of 1955. (Both Wesson and Mabry went on to teach and research in the field of medical sociology; Wesson at the University of Washington and at Brown University, Mabry at Syracuse and then at the University of Kentucky.) Though we know that Mohr, Mabry, and Wesson completed a book manuscript titled “The New Family,” it was never published, and there are no records available at Yale documenting their analytical work.14
Previously housed in various offices at the Child Study Center, the accumulated notes, reports, photographs, interviews, and analyses generated by the study were transferred to Manuscripts and Archives beginning in 1996. Several separate gifts or accessions from various faculty members and project staff members now comprise the Records of the Child Study Center, School of Medicine, Yale University, concerning the longitudinal study, circa 1951–1965 (inclusive). The Department of Psychology, at the behest of William Kesson, had transferred to Manuscripts and Archives in 1989 what was then thought to be the personal papers of Katherine Wolf. When archivists realized that her records complemented and in some cases duplicated those records coming from the Child Study Center, they determined that the Wolf materials should be kept as part of the records of the study.
The accumulated day-to-day records of observations, results of tests, and notes of interviews by pediatricians, teachers, and therapists present a detailed accounting of the moment-to-moment activity of the child subjects and an unusually rich description of family life in the 1950s in urban America. Figure 2, drawn from a Commonwealth Fund report, outlines the assorted types of material that study investigators created.15
Even when the records were being held at the Child Study Center, researchers had begun to mine this material for their historical studies. In transferring the records to Manuscripts and Archives, the donors intended to preserve this valuable resource while continuing to make it available to scholarship. Their goals paralleled the mission of the department, which is to collect and preserve materials of historical value. The archivists want these records to be used rather than stored away, never seeing the light of a reading room lamp. The repository also provides a safe environment and promotes proper handling of the documents in order to ensure their long-term survival. To promote these goals, the archivists followed standard archival practice.
In order to make records accessible, archivists arrange and describe them. Whenever possible, they organize the records according to their original order and filing systems. A group of records that are related as the result of being created, received, or used in the same activity are described as a series. The Yale archives staff established five series within the fifty-three linear feet of the longitudinal study records: I. Family Data; II. Administrative Files; III. Photographs; IV. Katherine Wolf Rec ords; and V. Data on Families (duplicates).
In keeping with standard archival practice, the archivists also created a finding aid to serve as a guide to the records. It is somewhat analogous to the preface, table of contents, and index to a book. In it, the researcher can find information on how and when the records came to the archives, their provenance, and any restrictions on access or specific terms governing use. The finding aid will also include information on the organization that created the records, as well as a description of the collection’s size, contents, document types, arrangement, and subject matter. It provides the researcher with a container list or inventory, which itemizes the contents of a box or a folder in summary fashion; archivists seldom describe individual documents. The container list allows the researchers to select specific materials that they wish to examine further. Previously available only on paper, Yale’s finding aids are now online and often can be found using search engines such as Google.
Figure 3 provides a listing of the document types found in the research records.16 These types of records now comprise the files included in the first series, Family Data, which can be found in the first twenty-two boxes of the records and which make up more than half the material in the records. Study staff wrote their own notes and observations, which researchers will find as revealing about professionals’ attitudes as they are about the subjects they studied. These were reproduced, some as typed carbon copies and others as mimeographed copies, and filed in notebooks to be shared with other project staff. The archives received multiple copies of these notebooks and selected the most complete, most legible copy of each volume for inclusion in the first series. The duplicate copies were placed in the fifth series.17
The family data are organized by family name. (See Figure 4 for a sample page of the finding aid from the first series.) There are compiled records for ten families who were followed for the duration of the project, as well as six families who discontinued their participation before the project ended. The names listed in the finding aid are not the families’ real names; rather they are code names developed by the project staff for use in their research discussions. They used a third set of names when referring to family members in the publications that resulted from the study. Some of the earliest data may contain a family’s real name and other personally identifiable information.
The data cover the years of each family’s participation in the study, generally from 1950 through 1959. The narrative notes and other documents are arranged in chronological order for each family. There is one box of data for the six discontinued subjects. By contrast, the data for nine of ten families fill approximately one box per family. For one family the record is much more extensive, with twelve linear feet of records covering the years 1951 through 1964, and includes notes on work with both parents and three siblings. Additional data that pertain to individual families are included in the third series, Photographs, and the fourth, Katherine Wolf Records. The photographs include posture pictures of the nude children taken to augment the project’s textual data.
William Kessen preserved the records of Wolf’s research and writing, and it is through his efforts that we know of her role in the study. These records include study data for approximately twenty-four families. Her observations in the hospital, including her drawings in “motor shorthand,” and in the early well-baby clinics, document the first child in the ten families who participated fully in the longitudinal study as well as the six who discontinued participation and several additional families. For the discontinued subjects there may be only two data folders, but for families who went on to full participation in the project, there are as many as thirty-six folders of observations. The Wolf records also include her correspondence and drafts for her writings about the study participants.
Surprisingly, there are few administrative files included in these records. There are no drafts of grant proposals, correspondence with funding agencies, financial accounts, or agendas for meetings. There are, however, some notes on research meetings detailing the issues raised there, as well as evaluative observations for nine of the ten fully participating families and records of follow ups with participants from the 1970s and 1980s. These records are in the second series.
Because the Yale Longitudinal Study took place in an era before research protocols had been established for the use of human subjects, participants were never asked to sign release forms granting future researchers access to their records. These files contain medical records, therapy notes, and personal revelations of study participants who never expected their lives to be the subject of the scholarly magnifying glass. Interviews with expectant mothers, for instance, contain discussions of their health history, religious beliefs, and feelings about their husbands and other members of their families, as well as their views on marriage and childrearing. These subjects are of historical interest.
In order to make these records available to research, the archives staff needed to consider how to balance the scholar’s desire for access to sources with the subject’s right to privacy and confidentiality. Archivists have been dealing with these issues for a long time, but our basic position is clear: “A repository should not deny any researcher access to materials, nor grant privileged or exclusive use of materials to any researcher, nor conceal the existence of any body of materials from any researcher, unless required to do so by law, institutional access policy or donor or purchase stipulations.”18
This statement alludes to the guidance provided by institutional policies on access to its records. Yale Corporation regulations, for example, restrict access to university records for a minimum of thirty-five years from the date the records were created. Some categories of records are given more stringent access restrictions. Student records (defined as credentials, grade sheets, correspondence, reports, notes, applications, and all other records pertaining to past and present students) are closed for the life of the student plus five years or for seventy-five years from the date the student graduates or withdraws from the university, whichever is longer. Similarly, personnel records of the university’s faculty and staff, including search committee and tenure review files, are closed for the life of the person plus five years or for seventy-five years after an individual’s retirement or departure, whichever is longer.
These restrictions on access are obviously designed to protect the individual’s right to privacy. The time limits imposed ensure that a student or personnel record is released only when the individual concerned is deceased. There is then no problem in opening confidential records since the right to privacy ceases upon the individual’s death. The Yale Corporation’s regulations recognize the need for exceptions that would allow earlier access to documents for scholarly purposes. These must be authorized by the university secretary after consultation with the university archivist.
Deciding how to give access to the child study records would have been easy if we could have adhered to these regulations. These policies and regulations, however, do not apply to confidential data files received as part of a donation from an individual investigator or his or her heirs. When the archives receive data files from an individual, as is the case with the longitudinal study records, the staff must work with the donor to establish the most suitable means to administer the use of these files. The donor of data files for research involving human subjects should be able to explain to the archivist how the data were collected, whether subjects provided releases, and if the data divulge personally identifiable information. This information will help the archivist determine adequate terms to govern the use of the records so as not only to protect the privacy and confidentiality of the subject but also to provide fair and equitable access. The archivists must not be placed in the position of determining who has a “legitimate” research need to see the papers.
If the donor feels that without exception no research project is so important as to outweigh the subject’s right to privacy, then no one can have access until a period of closure, similar to that for the university’s student or personnel files, has elapsed. We did not consider this possibility with the Yale Child Study records. Since the donors had already given some researchers access to these files when they were still housed in the offices of the Child Study Center, some cats, so to speak, were already out the bag.
With the donors, we considered the possibility of some less drastic means of restricting access. Could we, for instance, remove the personally identifiable information from the files, a process referred to as redaction? The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (known as the HIPAA Privacy Rule) identifies eighteen elements that could be used to identify an individual or the individual’s relatives, employers, or household members. While some of these elements, such as Internet addresses or facsimile numbers, did not exist in the 1950s, reading through the HIPAA list does suggest how labor-intensive and costly the redaction process could be.19 First, someone would have to read each page of each document. If personally identifiable information was found, the original page would need to be removed and copied. Where needed the text would be blacked out on the copy, which would then be copied again to ensure that eradication was complete. This copy would be placed in the papers, which could then be opened. Similarly, facial features would be blackened in photographs to protect the identity of the individual. Redaction is a process that can only be undertaken when the quantity of the material to be redacted is small. In some cases, the researchers are asked to pay for the redacting process, though one could argue that imposing such fees for access fails the equitability test for researcher access.
Because the quantity of data in the child study records was so large, we could not contemplate reading each page. The earliest data do include forms completed by family members, and the redacting of these would not have been an insurmountable task. Reading through narrative notes and summaries of conversations is another matter indeed. Though we know that at some point the staff creating the data started using code names for family members, without extensive reading we could not be sure when in the records this happened.
At one point, we investigated the cost to digitize the entire data series. Digitization sounded attractive because it would allow researchers to search key words relevant to their subject, such as “aggression” or “breast-feeding.” Theoretically, too, the archives staff could have searched the digitized material and located the instances where actual family names appeared. This information then could have been redacted in the digital copy, which could then be opened to all researchers. Unfortunately, while digitization was possible, if expensive, the optical character recognition (OCR) needed to turn pixels into letters and words was not. Records created on faint carbons, with differing typewriters and on various colored papers on a mimeograph machine, proved to be too great a challenge for the existing OCR software. Our tests of these documents returned gibberish.
We have sometimes employed a nondisclosure agreement that includes a waiver signed by the patron. This waiver states that although the patron will be allowed to see confidential records, he or she cannot disclose names or other information that could be used to identify an individual, and that violations of this agreement could lead to legal action. The patron must also agree to hold the repository harmless if legal proceedings are instituted.20 Not all donors are willing to accept such an agreement. William Kessen, who donated the Katherine Wolf materials in the Yale Child Study records, was of this mindset.
Proposals for research with human subjects currently must be submitted to some form of institutional review board (IRB), which ensures the ethical treatment of human research subjects. The donors of the longitudinal study records did not feel that access to these records could be governed by Yale’s IRBs. While any research conducted by a Yale-affiliated researcher that involves the use of human subjects must be reviewed by one of the four Yale institutional review boards, not all of those seeking access to the records would be Yale affiliated. Approximately half of the registered readers in Manuscripts and Archives have no connection to the university. Further, the review procedures concern the collecting of new data and its impact on subjects rather than the repurposing of previously collected data.
The donors and the Yale archivists eventually agreed that the best solution was for the files to be restricted until 2050 (one hundred years from the study’s inception). This date would presumably ensure that all the participants were deceased. But the donors had not wanted a complete closure of the records and were, in fact, eager for the records to be used. We thus needed a way to decide, on a case-by-case basis, who has a legitimate need to use the records. Since many of the records’ donors were now deceased, we needed to find an authorizing agency that was currently active in the field and would presumably exist for the duration of the restriction. Consequently, researchers are now informed that in order to use the records before 2050, they must secure written authorization from the coordinator of the Anna Freud Centre Program at the Yale Child Study Center, who has the expertise required to make this determination.
In fact, so far we have had few requests concerning these records. The archives staff has asked for permission to show a sample from these files to classes in the history of science and medicine and to classes in women, gender, and sexuality studies. On each occasion, permission has been readily granted. Should students wish to pursue further research, they would need to obtain permission for their individual projects. Any requests to publish from the records would, likewise, require the written permission of the coordinator of the Anna Freud Centre Program at the Yale Child Study Center.
We have made our finding aid as widely available as possible so that the research community will know that the records exist and can be used by those given the necessary permission. These records clearly offer materials of interest for those studying the post–World War II American family and serve as a record of psychoanalytic practice of that era. As we make information about these records available, we anticipate receiving inquiries about them from students and scholars in a wide range of academic disciplines including history, psychology, women and gender studies, the history of science and medicine, American studies, and urban studies.
Figure 2a–d: Types of material created by study team
Figure 3a–c: Document types in research records
Figure 4: Sample page from series 1 in Online Finding Aid: Guide to the Child Study Center, School of Medicine, Yale University, Records Concerning the Longitudinal Study (RU 282), Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library
1. Letter to Katherine Bain, January 11, 1949, Milton Senn Papers, MS C 280a in the History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Md.
2. Milton Senn Papers, MS C 280a in the History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine; Ernst Kris Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress; Commonwealth Fund Records, Rockefeller Archives Center, Tarrytown, N.Y.
3. Letter from Sybil Escalona, May 2, 1949, Milton Senn Papers, MS C 280a in the History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine.
4. Memo by Ernst Kris, November 23, 1949, “Rooming-In Service and Child Study Center,” Milton Senn Papers, MS C 280a in the History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine.
5. Memo by Dr. Warren concerning an interview with Dr. Milton Senn, April 12, 1950, Commonwealth Fund Records, Rockefeller Archives Center.
6. Milton J. E. Senn to Lester J. Evans, May 3, 1950, Commonwealth Fund Records, Rockefeller Archives Center.
7. Ibid.
8. It is interesting that neither the Warren nor the Evans memos mentions the role of Kris or any of the other participants in the formulation of the project.
9. Memo by Dr. Warren concerning an interview with Dr. Milton Senn, April 12, 1950, Commonwealth Fund Records, Rockefeller Archives Center.
10. Senn to Evans, May 3, 1950, enclosure of supp. data, p. 5.
11. Ibid., p. 9.
12. Senn to Evans, May 3, 1950.
13. Notes by M.C.S., January 12, 1954.
14. Memo from Dr. Warren to Dr. Crane, October 1, 1958, and Memorandum for the files of Dr. Crane, May 21, 1959, Commonwealth Fund Records, Rockefeller Archives.
15. Milton Senn, “An Over-all Report of the Longitudinal Study of Personality Development,” December 7, 1953, appendix 1, Commonwealth Fund Records, Rockefeller Archives.
16. Ibid., appendix 2.
17. A box is equal to between one and one and a quarter linear feet of material.
18. ACRL/SAA Joint Statement on Access in Research Materials in Archives and Special Collections Libraries, June 2009, available online at www.ala.org/acrl/standards/jointstatement (accessed January 5, 2014).
19. Elements include name, all geographic subdivisions smaller than a state, all elements of dates directly related to an individual, telephone numbers, social security numbers, account numbers, and full-face photographic images.
20. Manuscripts and Archives employs a waiver for access to the Florence and Henry Wald Papers, which include information on the terminally ill patients whom Florence Wald studied in developing her ideas for the first hospice in the United States. The waiver states: “I agree to preserve the confidentiality of the individuals documented in these records. I will refrain from making any disclosure that would identify any person as the subject of these records. No names or other information making possible the specific identification of an individual will be used in any formal or informal oral presentation or conversation, nor in any teaching exercise, nor in any disseminated product that results from my research. I understand that failure to comply with this agreement may result in legal proceedings being initiated against me. In such a case, I agree to hold harmless and to indemnify Yale University, its officers, agents, or employees, for any loss or damage to them, including any associated legal fees.”
