The reliable vocational psychograph, which proceeds by means of a careful preliminary analysis of the qualities required in the given work, and uses specially adapted tests with reliable norms for their evaluation, is not yet available for any single occupation. The preliminary analyses so far made, whether by employer, psychologist, or engineer, give us little guidance, and until such guidance is forthcoming the special adaptation of tests and the accumulation of norms and standards cannot make much practical progress. The inadequacy of the analyses already offered should not discourage further effort in this direction. The alignment of the simple industrial processes along the general intelligence scale has already been begun. The description of the more complex tasks in terms of identifiable mental characteristics is a much more difficult task, but this very difficulty is at once a sign of the importance of the problem.
[6] "Conduct of Mind Series," D. Appleton & Co., New York.
The absence of complete vocational psychographs has not retarded the search for tests which, though more or less fragmentary, may have vocational significance. In fact, there are some twenty types of work for which tests have already been proposed, recommended, and more or less tentatively tried out. A brief account of these, with references to the more complete literature, will be given here, and some attempt made to evaluate the tests themselves.
Substitutes for the vocational psychograph, in the way of partial and suggestive tests, have been proposed in four different forms. Since the work of the immediate future will probably develop along these same lines, these four forms will be indicated here, and typical illustrations cited in each case.
A. There is first what may be called the method of the vocational miniature. Here the entire work, or some selected and important part of it, is reproduced on a small scale by using toy apparatus or in some such way duplicating the actual situation which the worker faces when engaged at his task. Thus McComas, in testing telephone operators, constructed a miniature switchboard and put the operators through actual calls and responses, meanwhile measuring their speed and accuracy by means of chronometric attachments. Stern and others recommend tests of the fidelity of report of a witness in court by letting him observe some rehearsed scene, some motion picture representation of a series of events, or some pictorial portrayal of a scene or episode, and examining into the faithfulness with which he can describe what he there saw.