Marjorie Fiske

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Marjorie Fiske (born June 25, 1914 in Attleboro , Massachusetts , † February 11, 1992 ) was an American professor of social psychology . She is the author of ten books on adult personality development and aging . She also chaired the PhD program in Human Development and Aging until she retired .

Life

Fiske studied psychology , specializing in social psychology, first at Mount Holyoke College , where she received a bachelor's degree in 1935. She then studied at Columbia University in New York City , where she graduated with a Master's in 1938. Until 1955 she worked in New York City with Paul Lazarsfeld , Robert K. Merton and C. Wright Mills . For Columbia's Bureau of Applied Social Research she carried out numerous empirical studies. She led interdisciplinary research groups with anthropologists , sociologists, psychiatrists and psychologists . In 1953 she took over the executive directorship of a new department of the bureau, the Planning Committee on Media Research, through which she came to the research department of the Voice of America , which was headed by her future husband Leo Löwenthal . In the same year she divorced her first husband and married Leo Löwenthal in 1953. In 1955 she accepted a professorship in the Department of Sociology at the School of Librianship at the University of California at Berkeley . In 1958, after three years at UCLA Berkeley, she moved to the Department of Psychiatry on the University of California's San Francisco campus . Her central focus was the personal development of people of middle and advanced age. She was honored with a PhD for her research by her old college. She also received the Robert W. Kleemeier Award and the Distinguished Service Award . In the early 1970s she separated from her second husband Leo Löwenthal. Until her retirement in 1981, she served as chair of the PhD program in Human Development and Age, a program she founded in 1971. Marjorie Fiske died on February 11, 1992 at the age of 78.

Scientific work

The central theme of the research promoted by Marjorie Fiske was personality development in middle-aged and older people. She often worked with large interdisciplinary research teams consisting of social and behavioral scientists. In their research design , Fiske and her team combined both psychological tests with questionnaires and narrative interviews, which in some studies were repeated over and over again with the subject of the research over the years. The result of this process were data sets that made it possible to analyze entire lifetimes. The method used also provided a whole range of insights into how men and women cope with the normal and unexpected events of middle and advanced age. She showed what is beneficial for mental health and what prevents it in the aforementioned stages of development. In her best-known work "Four Stages of Life", Marjorie Fiske and her research team dealt with the perspective in adult life in relation to questions of psychosocial adaptation in adulthood. Studies on the life cycle in adulthood were rare to this extent at the time of research. The results of the study helped to better understand specific changes within the life pattern, such as the divorce process, being a widow or similar changes. In addition, the previous research answered neglected questions with regard to adaptation to gradual change, such as ecological and socio-political developments in the outside world.

Honors

  • Robert W. Kleemeier Award from the Gerontolical Society of America.
  • Distinguished Service Award from the American Psychological Association's Division of Adult Development and Aging.

Works

  • Book selection and censorship; a study of school and public libraries in California. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1959.
  • Lives in distress; the paths of the elderly to the psychiatric ward. Basic Books, New York 1964. ISBN 978-0405127915
  • Aging and mental disorder in San Francisco, a social psychiatric study. Jossey-Bass Publishers, San Francisco 1967. ISBN 978-0835749060
  • Four stages of life. Jossey-Bass Publishers, San Francisco 1975. ISBN 0875892485
  • Middle age: the prime of life? Harper & Row, New York 1979. ISBN 978-0063181045
  • Change and continuity in adult life. Jossey-Bass Publishers, San Francisco 1990. ISBN 1555422497

literature

  • Graf, FW (Ed.): Paul Tillich on Theories and Problems of Aging. An interview about getting older with Marjorie Fiske Lowenthal from February 1965. Journal for the History of Modern Theology, April 15, 2014, Vol. 21 (1-2), pp. 250-270. ISSN  0943-7592
  • Heat, Humility, and Hubris: The Conundrum of the Fiske Report. Library Trends, 2014, Vol. 63 (1), pp. 57-74. ISSN  0094-3061
  • The focused interview: a manual of problems and procedures. American Anthropologist, Aug 1, 1957, Vol. 59 (4), p. 756. ISSN  0002-7294

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://texts.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb7c6007sj&doc.view=frames&chunk.id=div00017&toc.de
  2. ^ University of California: In Memoriam, 1992. In: texts.cdlib.org. Retrieved December 15, 2016 .
  3. ↑ http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf467nb41s/
  4. ^ A b c Paul Tillich: Paul Tillich on Theories and Problems of Aging. An interview about getting older with Marjorie Fiske Lowenthal from February 1965 . In: Journal for the History of Modern Theology . Vol. 21 (1-2), April 2014, pp. 250-270 .
  5. ^ Marjorie Fiske Lowenthal: Book Selection and Censorship. A Study of School and Public Libraries in California. Berkeley 1959.
  6. ↑ a b pine, Christie W .: Marjorie E. Fiske, Psychiatry: San Francisco . University of California, Berkeley 1992.
  7. ^ Marjorie Fiske Lowenthal: Four stages of life: a comparative study of women and men facing transitions . Jossey-Bass, San Francisco 1975, ISBN 0-87589-248-5 , pp. 292 .
personal data
SURNAME Fiske, Marjorie
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lowenthal, Marjorie Fiske
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American social psychologist
DATE OF BIRTH June 25, 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH Attleboro , Massachusetts
DATE OF DEATH February 11, 1992