Selected Process Notes and Research Summaries from the Yale Longitudinal Study
In the next pages we present sample materials from the Yale Longitudinal Study records, housed in the Yale University Library’s Manuscripts and Archives department. We offer these records to give readers a chance to make their own interpretations of the materials and to present just a small sampling of what is available to scholars for study. We begin with notes from Samuel Ritvo’s sessions with Evelyn around a three-month period in 1956. The session from April 11, 1956, is one of three that we refer to in Chapter 8. The other three, from May and June 1956, illustrate the continuity and discontinuity of themes from the selected April session.1
Following the notes from these sessions in 1956, we jump to commentary on two sessions in 1958 and one in 1961, each of which is also discussed in our interpretive chapter, Chapter 8. The materials from these sessions, conducted three years apart, provide a glimpse into the evolution of themes across time as both Evelyn and Ritvo learned and grew across the decade of her involvement with the study.
Finally, we provide one example of the investigative team’s “conversation” about the study’s progress in a report from 1952, predating Ritvo’s work with Evelyn. Here again is a glimpse into how the group was formulating, and struggling with, the enormity of its task and ambitions. These records are a window on a particular approach and theoretical frame for clinical research by investigators who were deeply engaged with the families recruited to the study while being immersed in the culture of their times.
NOTES
1. “Evelyn,” the primary subject discussed in this book and represented in these materials, provided permission for the reproduction of the sessions.
Figure 5a–b: Process notes for Ritvo’s work with Evelyn on April 11, 1956
Figure 6: Process notes for Ritvo’s work with Evelyn on May 11, 1956
Figure 7a–b: Process notes for Ritvo’s work with Evelyn on May 16, 1956
Figure 8a–b: Process notes for Ritvo’s work with Evelyn on June 13, 1956
Figure 9a–c: Process notes for Ritvo’s work with Evelyn on November 6, 1958
Figure 10a–c: Process notes for Ritvo’s work with Evelyn on November 17, 1958
Figure 11a–d: Process notes for Ritvo’s work with Evelyn on January 17, 1961
Figure 12a–n: Investigative team discussion notes, May 27, 1952
