From William Preyer to William Stern: On the role of developmental diaries in the beginnings of the German developmental psychology

Abstract

Exactly 125 years have passed since William Thierry Preyer published in 1882 The mind of the child, a publication which is known as the first textbook of modern developmental psychology. To a great extent, The mind of the child is based on diary notes that Preyer collected about his son Axel during the first three years of the child’s life. Although Preyer very soon became famous as the »founder of developmental psychology,« one of his prominent German successors, William Stern, was very critical of Preyer’s general orientation and his empirical methods. In our article, we first describe Preyer’s and Stern’s practices of taking diary notes and compare their explicit and implicit methodological standards. It turns out that Preyer and Stern adhered to different standards; thus, Stern’s critique is partly misleading. In the second part of our paper, we present in more detail Preyer’s and Stern’s diary notes on the development of the self concept, thereby pointing out that their diaries continue to be an vital source of information for developmental research. We conclude by comparing the classical diary studies with the current practice of collecting diaries within the framework of the qualitative vs. quantitative methods distinction.