Personal History XII - Post High School Education

Post High School Education

    As I neared the end of my high school time, I experienced several influences pushing me to go to college.  This was not the particular norm for graduates of Glenwood High School, but this was what my mother had done, for one year, and some of her siblings, and also my grandfather Davenport.  I was conscious of my future from such things as when I was a little boy, after I was in bed, my dad would come into my bedroom to talk.  He asked me questions, such as, what color or what kind of car would I drive, or what did I want to be when I grew up.
    Also, I was aware that there was a savings bond that my parents had purchased that was to go for my education.  The fact that it was only for $25 did not seem to matter.  It represented something about their goal or expectation for me or my destiny.  I heard them say that getting an education would enable me to do better and greater things than would be possible if I stayed in Glenwood valley, that education would be the key to better life.
    My high school teachers also seemed to expect that I attend college.  I was the valedictorian of my senior class which would automatically entitle me to a scholarship at Washington State University at Pullman.  My friend Ron McNutt was being encouraged by his parents, and me along with him, to apply to one of two Presbyterian colleges in the area, Whitman College, in Walla Walla, or Lewis and Clark College, in Portland.  Some suggested that I  consider Reed College which was also in Portland, which had a reputation for high level scholarship.
    During the spring of our high school senior year (1954) Ron and I drove down to Portland to visit Lewis and Clark.  We were hosted by one of the student body officers, who attempted to sell us on his school, and also, interestingly, testified to us about the importance of living high moral standards.  We stayed overnight in the mens dorm, and were treated helpfully another young man.  Oddly, I met him again when I enrolled at BYU in 1955.  In the meantime, he had been baptized a member of the Church and changed colleges.
    I do not recall how far along I had gotten in the application processes of any of these schools by the time of my high school graduation.  I think at least I had the Washington State acceptance in hand.  I have described elsewhere in more detail the happenings the week after graduation, that were able to fulfill my dreams of being baptized and then experiencing a strong impression to attend BYU.  Along with that, I made the strategic decision to work for a year, to save money and to allow my age group to catch up with me.  I got some flack from some of my high school teachers over this decision.  One said, “Then you will never go to college.”
    This choice was unusual, I suppose, but the added year’s maturation before leaving home probably was helpful and enabled me to adjust successfully to living away from home.
    As I began college, one of the challenges I had was in trying to select a direction for my classwork.  I had had so very little experience with college educated professionals, and ws so naive about what they did in tier work.  This was troublesome to me, not only in trying to envision a major as I started college but also when I was well along in graduate school.  Growing up in Glenwood, our family had a medical doctor and a dentist, both in White Salmon, that I had visited on an occasion or two.  Otherwise, the only other professionals I had ever seen in action were school teachers.
    At the very first, I thought that perhaps I should point toward engineering or something having to do with the sciences.  The first quarter I took a basic chemistry class and a beginning math class.  I could do the work but it turned out that these were the least interesting classes in my schedule, and so I veered in another direction.  I enjoyed my vocal music experience that year, but my mind told me that music would not provide a good career if I wanted to be a father and raise a family.  Physical education classes were fun.  I toyed with the idea of becoming a teacher and a coach, and the following year enrolled in PE skills classes each term for majors in that field.
    Finally the idea came more strongly that I should major in something where I could be of service and help people, and I made a commitment to the field of psychology.  Perhaps these feelings were parallel to the interest I had developed at about the same time to serve a mission.
    While serving as a missionary, that position seemed to me to be reinforced by a woman who invited my companion and me into her home.  She asked my what my college major would be when I was released for the mission, and when I replied “Psychology,” she launched into discourse of approval saying how important it is to get Christians into that field.
    Back from the mission in the fall of 1959, I got seriously into classwork in psychology with a minor in sociology.  One thing I discovered about both of these fields was that they were not much directly about helping people.  Rather they were both about establishing a scientific basis for study of mental and social things.  They were both about research and emphasized acquiring and applying the tools of the physical sciences in these studies.  In the years that followed I remained a little conflicted over this and sometimes wished that there was more in these studies about practical application for helping people. 
    I finished a Bachelors degree in May of 1961 in psychology, still a little uncertain about what to do next.  I went home to Glenwood for the summer and worked with my dad doing carpentry things at Les Lloyd’s dude ranch.  Our country was sort of between wars at this time but was still drafting soldiers and we were drifting toward more involvement in Vietnam.  I was classified 1-A in the draft.  I toyed with the idea of volunteering for the Air Force and went so far as to go down to Portland get some testing to see what I might be offered in the military.
    Then I got a call from someone in the BYU Psychology Department.  They were upgrading their Master’s program starting in the Fall, and were looking for some more students.  Would I be interested?  I decided to return to the Y.  I also was offered an internship, which would help with the costs of school.
    The internship involved helping staff the Department’s statistical lab.  It was a small room with a bunch of machines that would run basic statistical procedures.  This was pre-computer technology.  I spent several hours a week helping undergraduate psychology majors to crank on these old machines and complete their assignments from their basic statistics course.
    Generally I found the classes in psychology interesting and moderately challenging.  I still recall some research on the binding together of social groups, that cohesiveness of groups is best established in small intimate groups.  Therefore, to bind people to a larger group, let’s say a ward, it works best to build relationships between persons in small subgroups.  In my experience men and women who have had the chance to serve in presidencies and form close relationship there, seem to feel more closer to the ward.  In our Taylorsville Gardens wards we worked hard at creating small social groups for the adults, such as 4-couple dinner groups that met monthly then were rotated, and small temple sealing groups, to attach family heads more closely to our ward.
    The last part of the work toward the master’s degree was a thesis, a small independent research effort.  I worked closely with two young professors, Kay Smith and Daryl Pererson on this project.  Dr. Smith suggested a study which followed along on his own dissertation about how people naively judge or perceive each other.  The statistics to do this were pretty advanced and complex, and acquainted me with a procedure called factor analysis.  This was a statistical way to simplify or find common underlying dimensions in what looks on the surface to be a very complex situation.  In the process, the researcher gets measures on a variable or set of variables, then does the factor analysis to identify the underlying simpler dimensionality, then finally correlates these factors with other measure to try to define what these dimensions are measuring.  It is sort of like working a puzzle, where the answers gradually become evident, or maybe processing a photograph and seeing the picture gradually emerge on the photo paper while it is still in the chemical tray.  I liked this procedure for research a lot and used it several times over the course of my working career.
    In this case it was harder, however, because I was doing this before computerized statistical programs were readily available.  We first obtained a step by step logical description of the process written by a professor at one of the big California universities.  The BYU computer center assigned a graduate student to me to write the program so that I could analyze my data.  His first try did not work.  To make it work, he and I sat down and talked through in detail what he had programmed, while I followed along on the logical description.  Finally we identified where he had missed the point, and the program worked for my data.  In the Thesis Appendix, I included a two page write-up of his program, “Fortransit source program for factor analysis, centroid method without re-estimation of communalities.”  Shortly after this time, computerized statistical packages appeared that made the statistical analysis of research data much more accessible and convenient.
    Here are summary and conclusions of this study, “The Dimensions of Interpersonal Perception: a Multidimensional Scaling Approach”:
    The purpose of this study was to investigate and identify the dimensions of perception in two on-going groups.  The procedure used was the multidimensional scaling method of equal-appearing intervals.  This method was selected because it enables the investigator to arrive at the dimensionality without making any a priori judgments about the nature of the dimensions.  This particularly an advantage in the study of an area such as interpersonal perception when little research has been done previously.
    The subjects were the students in the Master of Business Administration program at Brigham Young University during the school year 1962-63.  The first year group (group I) of 16 students and the second year group (group II) of 13 students were analyzed separately in order to obtain some indication of the stability of the obtained dimensions.
    Each subject made a general judgment of relative similarity of difference between every possible pair of members of his group on an eight point scale. An approximation to a ratio scale was obtained by adding a constant to all of the average distances.
Scalar products between points referred to an origin at the centroid of all the points were computed from the absolute distances.  The scalar products were factor analyzed by the centroid method.  Three factors were judged to be significant for each group and were rotated orthogonally to simple structure.  These factors represented the major dimensions upon which the subjects perceived the members of their group.  Identification of the factors was accomplished by correlating them with measures of a number of personality variables.  These included ratings by' the students and their professors, information from student files and scores on the Guilford-Zimmerman Temperament Survey.
A comparison of the factors seems to show that the perceptual dimensions for the two groups are somewhat similar.  Factor I for both groups related to individual competency.  The basis for their judgments seemed to differ, however.  The Group I judgments seemed related to perceived competency while Group II were able to judge from demonstrated competency.  Also for Group II there was an emphasis on effective social relationships.
The second factor tor both groups related to social orientation and group maintenance as opposed to aggressive self-interest.
There were no significant correlations with Factor III for Group II.  Factor III for Group I was very tentatively thought to relate to social interest and self understanding.
These factors seemed to be related to dimensions of perception found by Burke & Bennis (1961) using the Group Semantic Differential scale and to perceptual dimensions of personality obtained by Jackson, Messick, & Solley (1957) using multidimensional scaling procedures.  They also are similar to dimensions of behavior in groups which investigator using other methodologies have revealed.
    In summary, the applicability of multidimensional scaling procedures to the investigation of the dimensions of perception of a group was again demonstrated.  The perceptions were found to be ordered in a limited dimensionality and to be relatively stable across two groups.  The dimensions were found to be consistent with the findings from the limited amount of research that has been done in the area of interpersonal perception and also to correspond to observed dimensions in groups. (From Robert E. Lewis master’s thesis, Chapter VI, “Summary and Conclusions,” The Dimensions of Interpersonal Perception: a Multidimensional Scaling Approach, Brigham Young University, July 1963)
    As I was finishing this study, I was dating seriously and then engaged to JoAnn.  I was grateful to her for typing my psychology master’s thesis.  I remember driving over to Spanish several times with edited drafts in hand and picking up improved versions.
    As I was completing the work for the master’s degree, I still did not have a very good vision of what should come next education and career wise.  Midway through the program I took a national standard exam in psychology, called the Graduate Record Examination (GRE), which was a number of sometimes used to a evaluate candidates for graduate work in psychology and other fields.  This made me the focus of additional attention by faculty members, because I scored in the top one or two percentiles.  Faculty persons seemed sure that I should go some somewhere else to work on a Ph.D.  Kay Smith, my thesis advisor, suggested a program in industrial psychology, where I might find practical applications in my work.  I applied to three places for doctoral work and was accepted in all three, and finally decided on a program at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan.
    JoAnn and I got married on September 5th, of that very year (1963) and honeymooned our way across country to Detroit.  Quickly we were expecting our first baby.  Marriage and impending fatherhood amplified and mad more real my concerns about education and career choices.  It became apparent to me that I would not have a very happy wife living far away from Utah.  I also reflected on a line in my patriarchal blessing, “I bless you with the blessings of the everlasting hills, homes and habitations to live in.”  I asked myself the questions, “Where are the jobs for industrial psychologists?  Am I educating myself right out of being able to live where I and my family need to be and will be the happiest?”
    The answer was clear.  So I made the choice to leave that doctoral program at Wayne State after the end of the quarter and for us to return to live in Utah.
    Still focusing career and education, when we returned to Spanish Fork, I weighed more deeply my interests, and of course began to be more serious and to try to be more realistic about my expectations.  To keep us in some income I sold Watkins products door to door in Payson.  We found an apartment to rent in Fred Jex’s basement, in the Spanish Fork 1st ward, and Reed Hughes owner of Hughes Dairy, who was in this ward, had me run an early morning milk route in portions of Spanish Fork for a short time.  I explored the possibility of teaching seminary, took a BYU class and student-taught in the Spanish Fork High School Seminary in the class of Robert Foster.  But I didn’t get a job offer. 
    I haunted Job Service looking for something that my psychology background would qualify me to do.  There were openings with the state of Utah, for juvenile corrections workers but especially for welfare workers.  I took some tests, was qualified, and offered jobs all in the same week in the Ogden and Salt Lake offices, but took a position in Provo offered by the old Utah County Welfare Department head, Bessie Meiling.  I started employment for the State, June 1, 1964.
    I began work as a family (AFDC) welfare caseworker with a limited size caseload that was supposed to allow for intensive work these clients, with objectives to improve family and parental functioning and their potential for financial independence.  I thought that the work was useful and satisfying.  I also quickly noticed that persons needed a Masters of Social Work degree to advance in the organization.  Along with that, the Department was offering a generous stipend program to employees to go back to school and earn their MSW that was a part of President Johnson’s war on poverty. 
    There were a limited number of these new stipends each year, six I believe, which paid full tuition plus three-fourth salary during the two school years that the program required to achieve this advanced degree.  Liking my employment by the state agency, JoAnn and I decided after a year and a half, that I should try for this stipend.  I applied and was accepted into the MSW program at the University of Utah, but did not get the stipend for 1966.  I got a nice promotion, however, to administer a program at the welfare-related at the Geriatric Unit of the Utah State Hospital, to place stable elderly patients in nursing home.  I postponed my matriculation to the program at the U of U, and then was awarded the stipend to start work on my MSW in the fall of 1967. We were living in Orem at this time, and I commuted (car pooled) to the U campus with another student.  Classes in the program were two or three days a week.  The other days were spent at field placements (internships).  Mine were in Utah County, at the Utah State Training School in American Fork, and at the Jefferson School in Springville.
    I found the classes in social work relevant and interesting.  The three years I had worked in the field helped me to ask the right questions and gave me meaningful insights.  I even found enjoyment in being in the social work section of the U of U library, and randomly pulling out and reading from books on the field.  I also began to discover a strength that I had in comparison to most other social work students, and one that they generally didn’t even want to have–I could relate to quantitative things. 
    Requirements in the MSW program included a group thesis, and toward the end of the second year, somehow I was involved in a group of ten persons.  We met together and struggled for consensus, finally agreeing on a direction, with some difficulty developed an interview strategy, and finally reached to point where we needed to write up our findings.  I expressed some of my frustrations and also concerns to another member of the group, Evan Jones–deadlines for finishing the project were fast approaching.  Like me, Evan was from the our Department and was trying to upgrade his ability to complete for promotions.   He had been serving as director of our agency’s personnel office and was a younger brother of Dan Jones, the Utah pollster.  Evan had the same concerns, so we agreed to meet and strategize about finishing the thesis write-up.  We decided that it would be impossible for the writing to be done as a group project involving the other members of our group, so the two of just assigned ourselves to write up the results, and in about a week the thesis text was nearly complete.  Everyone breathed a sigh of relief and graduated on schedule.
    Here is a summary of our study, “Runaway Youth in Salt Lake County: a Study of Their Use of Social Service Agencies and Community Planning Related to Their Problems”:
    The purposes of this study were: (1) to examine a select sample of "runaways" at the Salt Lake County Detention Center in relation to various personal characteristics, their reasons for running away, and their knowledge and utilization of social services; (2) to review the kinds of social services available to youth in Salt Lake County, the agency executives' knowledge of the "runaway" problem and their participation in planning for youth services; (3) to determine the extent to which Salt Lake County social planning executives knew of the "runaway" problem and their involvement in planning for youth services which may be related to the problems of "runaways."
    Three interrelated but separate samples were selected in order to study the research questions.  The first sample consisted of 80 “runaways” to the Detention Center.  The second sample consisted of 27 social service agencies in Salt Lake County to which the “runaways” could have access.  The third sample in this study consisted of six planning organizations which were considered to be the planning structure tor youth-oriented social services in Salt Lake County. 
There were nearly twice as many females as males in the study sample.  The Spanish-American ethnic group was more prevalent than in the total public school population of Salt Lake County.  A large majority of the sample attending school considered themselves either failing or doing poorly in school.  Almost half of the “runaways” were 1iving with both natural parents, 60 percent of the “runaways” in this study had been admitted to the Detention Center prior to their present confinement.
    Running away was found to be symptomatic of personal-familial problems which the “runaway” bad been experiencing for six months or longer.  In three out of every four “runs” the primary cause for running was “trouble at home.”
    A large majority of the selected agencies in Salt Lake County at the time of this study were not known to the “runaways” in the sample.  Approximately two-thirds of the agencies known to the “runaways” had never been visited.  Among the visited agencies only nine percent of the “runaways” went voluntarily to seek help with their problems.  In 55 percent of the cases the youth in the study sample learned of agencies either from friends or from personal experience.  Law enforcement, detention, probation and recreation services accounted for the majority of visits to social service agencies.  Two of every three youth who had visited agencies indicated that in their judgment they had not been helped in resolving their problems.
    Three out of four of the selected social service agencies offered various kinds of counseling services.  Eligibility requirements, fee scales, required parental permission, waiting lists, round-the-clock services, and/or public information programs had no relationship in this study to either knowledge or utilization of the services by the “runaway.”  A large majority of the agency directors were unable to accurately estimate the number of “runaways” in Salt Lake County.
    The executives of the planning agencies of Salt Lake County had a rather sophisticated knowledge of the “runaway” problem.  Only one of the six planning structure organizations was developing a specific direct service program for “runaways.”  However, all were participating 1n the planning of youth services.  These executives indicated that a major obstacle to effective delivery of services to youth in Salt Lake County was a lack of coordination and cooperative planning.
(Abstract for Master’s Thesis, by Lawrence S. Bradshaw, Kenneth R. Dubois, Sandra M Hoogland, Even E. Jones, Jr., Otto F. Jones, Ronald B. Kelly, Leslie Ann Laymon, Robert E. Lewis, Arthur H Lisne, and Vernon R. Morgan, “Runaway Youth in Salt Lake County: a Study of Their Use of Social Service Agencies and Community Planning Related to Their Problems,” University of Utah, June 1969) 
    As an aside, the relationship I formed with Evan Jones led to some promotions and also some nice opportunities for professional growth and contributions.  In June, I went back to a caseload in the Utah County office, but by the end of the summer, Evan had been appointed as director of a demonstration project on staff utilization, and came calling wanting me to join the project.  Within the next year, he was appointed director of our Agency and I replaced him as director of the Manpower Project.  When that project finished its work, he invited me to serve in the position of Planning Director for our agency.
    There was at least one more major educational endeavor remaining in my life.  A number of years had passed and I had served in a number of roles and positions in my state agency.  It was about 1986.  This was at a time that I had been experiencing some frustration with my work assignments.  I had been turned down for a Regional Director position I had wanted.  I was doing insignificant work, serving in an audit and evaluation unit.  I determined to work on a doctorate, as perhaps a strategy to elevate my position and competitiveness in our Department.  I applied and was accepted into a doctoral program at the School of Social Work at the U of U.  I had gotten support from my supervisor, Dick Crouch, who allowed me to spend some time at the school for classwork and some use of work-related resources in my studies.
    I found these studies exhilarating.  I have said to some of my grandchildren, that education became more relevant and enjoyable each additional step I took.  Starting in grades seven and eight which were barely survivable, high school was better, college was better than high school, master’s studies better that undergraduate work, and these doctoral studies better than they all.  Of course, I was older and could relate to most of the instructors as peers.
    I quickly gained relationships with staff persons in the Social Research Institute which was attached to the School of Social Work and its director, Mark Fraser.  Also Fred Janzen and Peter Pecora, both of whom were research-oriented faculty persons.  These relationships were helpful in developing my dissertation project and continued with cooperative endeavors after I finished my doctorate and was serving in later positions with my state agency.   We did several joint research projects, and published their results.  Fred also worked with me as a consultant on some of our Division projects.   Fred and I also worked together teaching some social work classes for the school on research and computer applications.
    Peter and Mark had a federal grant to study family preservation services in child welfare. For my doctoral dissertation, I was able to use data that they had collected.  I contributed a chapter to a book that they published, and participated. in other ways in their research on this subject.  Intensive family preservation service was an innovative program initiative in child welfare at that time, and for that matter, it still is.  It attempted to remedy some of the faults in the public child welfare system by putting more resources into helping families with a history of child neglect to improve their parenting skills and efforts, thus reducing removals of children and other forms of family break-up.  I have more to say about my efforts with these services in the chapter on my working career.
    Here is a summery of my dissertation study, “Service-Related Correlates of Treatment Success in Intensive Family Preservation Services for Child Welfare.”
    The purposes of this study were to describe the characteristics of intensive family preservation services (FPS) and to identify the association between FPS variables and desired treatment outcomes as defined by service goal attainment and prevention of out-of-home-placement of children.  Subjects were 581 children from 453 families served by two related FPS programs, Homebuilders in the state of Washington and the Family Preservation Project of the Utah Department of Social Services.  The latter had been trained in FPS by staff of the Homebuilders' program.
    Findings from this study provided empirical data supporting the comprehensive and intensive nature of this model of FPS.  Important elements of this model included the provision of concrete services and utilization of a broad range of clinical services.  Clinical approaches included a major emphasis on both social learning approaches and psychotherapeutic interventions.  The most significant services directly associated with reduced risk of out-of-home placement were the clinical intervention Time/Money Management, the amount of therapist time spent in providing concrete services, and goal attainment ratings.
    Service models predictive of the attainment of specific goals included a wide variety of clinical techniques, including psychotherapeutic interventions, social learning approaches, and concrete services.  Service models developed for adolescent and nonprotective service referra1 subgroups accounted for 1ower proportions of variance, had fewer significant interventions, and included fewer variables relating to concrete services and educational approaches.
    Among the implications of these findings was the affirmation of the essential features contained in the Homebuilders' model as an approach to preventing out-of-home placement of children.  Important components included provision of concrete services and a broad range of clinical interventions, encompassing both direct interventions and educationa1 approaches.  Models for resolving problems in families of adolescents suggested a somewhat different configuration of services.  Findings reinforce the need in social work practice and in social work education to continue to give attention to a broad range of intervention skills, including provision of concrete services, clinical techniques from a variety of theoretical paradigms, client training approaches, and community and social network involvement.
(Abstract for Doctoral Dissertation, Robert E. Lewis, “Service-Related Correlates of
Treatment Success in Intensive Family Preservation Services for Child Welfare,” University of Utah, June 1990.)
    Completing the work for my degree, Doctor of Social Work or DSW, seemed to work some changes in my attitudes and goals for work.  It seemed to free me in a way to pursue what I wanted and thought to be correct and to not be concerned with promotions or status positions.  I felt a sort of independence that I had not had before.  And oddly, it brought me back to where I started in psychology, emphasizing quantitative things, something I had dismissed earlier.  This all reminds me of some lines by T. S. Eliot:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
    At least, I believe I did this all in a way that supported and did not detract from the happiness and well-being of my family.
    I also enjoyed the opportunity to be a part of the academic world in a small way, in teaching some classes, coordinating on research projects, being on a dissertation committee, and have the status for a number of years of adjunct professor at the School of Social Work at the U.
    Here is one more higher education post-script.  Later, in the process of directing the SAFE (DCFS child welfare MIS) project, I acquired ten more graduate credit hours from Utah State University in information technology.
    And now, one more note about the field of social work.  I became convinced that the training that Social Work provided for persons to be helpers was perhaps the best practical preparation at the time for child welfare workers and even mental health counselors.   However, toward the end of my working career I let my membership in the National Association for Social Workers (NASW) lapse, because the national scene seemed irrelevant.  NASW had become dominated by feminists, apologists for same-sex marriage and LGBTQ causes, and other concerns of identity politics.  The history of social work, of course, had a focus in persons like immigrants who had special needs, and practitioners had always tried to be advocates for the poor and other victims of social problems, but the problems of concern to NASW seemed more elitist, than of the poor and needy.  On the other hand, our child welfare FPS initiative was aimed at strengthening families so that children would have the optimal environment for healthy development.  In some ways this appeared to be the opposite of the causes that NASW was concerned about at the moment.
    Additionally, the academic world that had always had some attraction to me, seemed more and more dominated by the same narrow ethos as NASW.  I served on a doctoral committee for Elaine Walton’s dissertation at the U of U.  She was a fortyish woman, who after finishing her doctorate, joined the faculty of the school of social work at Ohio State, and then later returned to Utah as the dean of the school of social work at BYU.  She reported on several ugly experiences and rejections by members of the OSU faculty, simply because of her membership in our Church.  I am glad to not have had these kinds of experiences in the academic world elsewhere.  I do not know if I could recommend social work as a career direction today.