Roger Barker

Roger Garlock Barker (1903 to 1990) was a social scientist and a founder of environmental psychology, best known for developing the concepts of behavior settings and staffing theory. He earned his doctorate at Stanford University under Walter Richard Miles. With Herbert Wright he set up the Midwest Psychological Field Station in Oskaloosa, Kansas, where his team gathered data from 1947 to 1972 on a town of fewer than 2,000 people, published under the disguise of Midwest, Kansas in One Boy's Day and Midwest and Its Children. With Paul Gump he wrote Big School Small School (1964), which showed that large and small schools hold a similar number of behavior settings, so students in small schools take more varied roles. He also helped shape ecological and rehabilitation psychology.