Monday, November 5, 2012

Bonnie Ruth Strickland

Bonnie Ruth Strickland

 

 
Her Background

Bonnie Ruth Strickland was born on November 24th, 1963 in Louisville Kentucky to Willie Whitfield and Roy Strickland. From a young age, Strickland felt that she was different and spent a good portion of her early life struggling with a lesbian identity. She had one younger brother and by the time she was eight her parents had separated and Strickland went  to live with her mother at 10 years old.  She enjoyed sports at a young age, specifically baseball and was given a chemistry set by her mother.  As a result she never put much stock in gender roles as many people encouraged her to work outside of them. She is still alive today

Her Education

Strickland through scholarships and waiting on tables, was able to afford to go to Alabama College for Women where her passion was to initially become an athlete and pursued a career path towards physical education  but later changed in her sophomore year to psychology and became interested in social issues, specifically racial prejudice. After graduating , Strickland applied for grad school at Ohio University where she met professors that were familiar with and utilized behavioral therapy who taught her each approach. Strickland also did clinical training at a Veteran Administration hospital in Palo Alto. She received her PhD in 1962

Her Professional Life

At 27, Strickland accepted a position at Emory University. After working two years as an assistant professor, she was promoted to Dean of Women which was geared towards helping out with problems that women faced at the college. At her time at this university she mostly struggled with her identity and focused her research mostly on marginalized races. Towards the end of her time at the college she did her first work with gay men and women and her research suggested that not only are gay men and women not more pathological then their straight counterparts, but that lesbians seem to be the healthiest overall.  
Her next stop was Amherst, University of Massachusetts where she felt much more at home due to the progressive nature of the school.

 There she taught what might be considered the first lesbian psychology course which the university endorsed quite openly. She went on to become one of the faculty senate status of Women Committee and eventually the director of graduate studies for the department.  In 1976 she became the chair of the psychology department which she held for seven years before becoming an associate for the chancellor, Joseph Duffy, of the college.

In 1973 she chaired an APA committee that discussed discrimination against women, people of different races and gays and lesbians. She described this experience as “eye opening” in regards to women’s issues. She also became the 7th head of the APA who was a woman and 3rd president of the Clinical Division of the APA. In 2008 she was named an Elder at the National Multicultural Summit not just because of what she had done but just for who she is.

Her Works

One of her major contributions to psychology is in the study of something called “The Locus of Control” which is a complicated term to mean a person’s thought on whether they have more control over themselves or their environment or whether the environment itself has more control. In her dissertation, Strickland showed that whether one’s Locus of control was internal (the self as an agent) or external (the environment as the decider) could ultimately affect how a person behaves in various social circumstances.  Strickland’s research is also among the few that showed a link between activism and the locus of control. It is also amongst the most cited research that it has gained the title of “Citation Classic.” She also helped to create a scale for children to determine expectancies of reinforcement which was later adapted by others into a pre-school scale and an elderly scale. Now there is a scale for all age ranges. Her scale for children is the most cited and considered the most valid.

While this is often considered her most important contribution, she has various research which extend from dealing with conformity to prejudice to reaserch of development of gay men and lesbians. She was also heavily involved in spreading awareness of depression in women to such an extent that many of her graduate students on both the masters and doctoral levels have studied depression to a large degree.

(Strickland, B. R.  (1995).  Research on sexual orientation and human development:  A commentary.  Developmental Psychology, 31(1), 137140.)

Strickland, B. R.  (1992).  Women and depression.  Current Directions in Psychological Science, 1(4), 132-135.

Our Class and Her Work

                In regards to the Locus of Control experiments that she has done it can be easy to imagine the effects of one’s sense of efficacy towards their agency can affect the various actions people do towards one another. For instance,  by demonstrating a link between this locus of control and activism, we see that there is a certain kind of learned helplessness in the public who are part of a group that is maligned or marginalized which further perpetuates the problem instead of these groups being pro-active. Conversely, those who have high efficacy of their agency or internal locuses of control are more likely to be the types who go out and protest or engage in any form of social activism.
                Women, being a marginalized group (despite making up more than 50% of the world’s population now) can be considered to be disenfranchised by the world due to the patriarchal societies strangle hold on their rights and freedoms. This of course as we know by now can cause a myriad of mental health problems from the patholization of normal, expected behaviors of those who are oppressed (depression) and direct causes of some things like eating disorders (I don’t have control over my weight, society has deemed that skinny women are superior thus it is not my responsibility and there is nothing that can be done about it). I’ve talked a little about the vicious cycle that society plays on women and it is clear because of Bonnie Strickland’s research that this vicious cycle cannot end until everyone’s faith in themselves becomes higher than the doom of society. It is possible to change.


My  References
http://www2.webster.edu/~woolflm/strickland.html
Women in Psychology: A Bio-Bibliographic Sourcebook

Written by Nick Messinger on 11/5/12

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