science

Roger Barker

Roger Barker is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Roger Barker rather than just read about it. In short: Roger Garlock Barker (1903 – 1990) was a social scientist, a founder of environmental psychology, and a leading figure in the field for decades. He is perhaps best known for developing behavior settings and staffing theory.

Key takeaways

Roger Barker belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Roger Barker to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Roger Barker from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Roger Garlock Barker (1903 – 1990) was a social scientist, a founder of environmental psychology, and a leading figure in the field for decades. He is perhaps best known for developing behavior settings and staffing theory. He was also a central figure in developing ecological and rehabilitation psychology. Barker earned his PhD from Stanford University, where his advisor was Walter Richard Miles. In the 1940s, Barker and his associate, Herbert Wright from the University of Kansas in Lawrence, set up the Midwest Psychological Field Station in the nearby town of Oskaloosa, Kansas, a town of fewer than 2,000 people. Barker's team gathered empirical data in Oskaloosa from 1947 to 1972, consistently disguising the town as "Midwest, Kansas" for publications like One Boy's Day (1952) and Midwest and Its Children (1955). Based on this data, Barker first developed the concept of the behavior setting to help explain the interplay between the individual and the immediate environment. One of his work's most valuable developments was examining how the number and variety of behavior settings remain remarkably constant even as institutions increase in size. His seminal work with Paul Gump, Big School Small School (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964) explored this. They showed that large schools had a similar number of behavior settings to small schools. A consequence was that students could take many different roles in small schools (e.g., in the school band and the school football team), while there was a greater tendency to be selective in larger schools. Val Curtis developed and used his concept of behavior settings since it allows predicting individual behaviour from the setting in which people find themselves. Barker died at his home in Oskaloosa in September 1990. He was survived by his wife, Louise Shedd Barker, with whom he collaborated on much of his research. Barker is the subject of a 2014 biography — The Outsider: The Life and Times of Roger Barker — by the award-winning American journalist Ariel Sabar.

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Roger Barker

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Roger Barker claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Roger Barker before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Roger Barker ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Roger Barker

In research: Roger Barker appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Roger Barker in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Roger Barker is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1903 births, 1990 deaths, 20th-century American psychologists, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Roger Barker outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Roger Barker in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Roger Barker means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Roger Barker out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Roger Barker in simple terms?

Why does Roger Barker matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Roger Barker?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Roger Barker.