Henry A. Murray Research Center of Radcliffe
The Murray Center (www.radcliffe.edu/ murray/overview/index.htm), founded in 1976, is home to over 270 datasets. Henry A. Murray, the personality theorist after whom the Center is named, devoted his career to the study of individual lives. The datasets he and those who have followed him at the Murray Center have collected reflect that bent. Ever wonder what happened to Lewis Terman's data once his classic Life Cycle Study of Children with High Ability was finished? They're alive and well in Cambridge, but lonely to meet new friends. They reside with the data from Mary Ainsworth's Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Attachment and Sears, Maccoby and Levin's Patterns of Child Rearing to name just a few of the all-time classics. They keep good company with more recent datasets such as Anne Petersen's Adolescent Mental Health Study, Kay Deaux and Joseph Ullman's Blue Collar Workers in the Steel Mill, Jacquelynne Eccles' Career Aspirations Among Smith Undergraduates: A Longitudinal Study, and Plomin, DeFries and Fulker's Colorado Adoption Project.
The data - not the journal articles, but the actual data - on which the careers of some of the most hailed scientists in our field were built are to be seen at the Murray Center. And these aren't dead data under glass we're talking about here. The data are there for your use, to be asked questions Eleanor Maccoby and Robert Plomin and Anne Petersen and Jacquelynne Eccles haven't thought of yet. More than that, it is possible with some of the datasets to gain access to the original respondents to ask new questions. Imagine that. Others took care of the first forty years of data collection for you so that you could simply build on their legacy.
It gets better. Henry Murray's philosophy was that a multidisciplinary approach is needed to understand the individual. While the common thread through all the Murray Center datasets is that they are tools to help us understand the individual, the data themselves are drawn from a variety of areas, not just from psychology but from psychiatry, anthropology, sociology, political science, indeed, the spectrum of the behavioral and social sciences. One might rightfully think of the Murray Center as an El Dorado: The gold is there for the taking.
How do you get to it? Easy. Go to the URL listed above. Choose "Data Archive" from the menu, and then select "Accessing Data." Click on "Registration Form" in the next window. Register. Click on "Application for the Use of Data" or "Computer Data Request Form" depending on the dataset or sets you want to use. Tell the folks at the Center what you've got in mind. They'll mull it over for a few days or a few weeks depending on what you are asking to do. Once they approve, you're in. And don't worry. They will work with you to see that your experience at the Murray Center is a successful one. They are there to give psychology away.
