An interview with W. N. Schoenfeld (july 22, 1990).
A short walk through JEAB’s birth shows how today’s journals and training texts began.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Ribes-Iñesta (1999) is a typed talk with W. N. Schoenfeld. He helped start the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior. The chat gives his first-hand view of how the journal and early classes began.
What they found
Schoenfeld says the field once had no place to publish. A small group met and built JEAB in 1958. He also wrote early textbooks that many of us still quote.
How this fits with other research
Kelleher et al. (1987) and Horton (1987) tell the same birth story. They show Charlie Ferster pushing the 1957 meeting that Schoenfeld later joined.
Laties (2008) picks up where the interview stops. It adds 50-year data: more women, more countries, free online papers.
Saville et al. (2002) count what the interview only hints at. Article share dipped in the 1980s, then rose again. The talk and the numbers together give a full arc.
Why it matters
Knowing the back-story helps you teach why we do single-subject charts. Use the interview quotes in class or supervision. Pair them with the 2008 update to show how a tiny group grew into a world field.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
This article is a transcription of an interview with William N. Schoenfeld made in 1990. William N. Schoenfeld (1915-1996) is one of the outstanding contributors to the initial stages of the experimental analysis of behavior. After graduating from Columbia University, Schoenfeld wrote, in collaboration with Fred S. Keller, what was at that time the most significant book introducing, and updating, the seminal contributions of B. F. Skinner and other behavioral psychologists: Principles of Psychology (1950). Schoenfeld was also instrumental in the design of a psychology course at Columbia University based on the integration of theory and laboratory work, as well as in the foundation of the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior in 1958. In 1968 Schoenfeld moved to the Queens College of the City University of New York, where he developed a doctoral program based in the research of stimulus schedules (T system), the analysis of conceptual and theoretical problems in operant conditioning, and the study of respondent and operant interactions under pharmacological agents. After his retirement from Queens College, Schoenfeld taught at Bar-Ilan University and the Hebrew University in Israel. The interview forms part of a research project on the experimental analysis of scientific behavior (Ribes, 1994), which also included two other distinguished and original contributors of the experimental analysis of behavior, B. F. Skinner and R. J. Herrnstein.
The Behavior analyst, 1999 · doi:10.1007/BF03391990