Roger Garlock Barker (1903, Macksburg, Iowa - 1990, Oskaloosa, Kansas) was a social scientist, a founder of environmental psychology and a leading figure in the field for decades, perhaps best known for his development of the concept of behavior settings.
Barker earned his PhD from Stanford University and spent two years studying with Kurt Lewin. In the 1940s Barker and his associate Herbert Wright from the University of Kansas in Lawrence set up the Midwest Psychological Field Station station in the nearby town of Oskaloosa, Kansas, a town of fewer than 2000 people. Barker's team gathered empirical data in Oskaloosa from 1947 through 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.
Possibly one of the most valuable developments of Barker's work was the examination of the way in which the number and variety of behavior settings remains remarkably constant even as institutions increased in size.This was explored in his seminal work with Paul Gump published as Barker, R. and Gump, P. (1964) Big School Small School Stanford: Stanford University Press [ Available at http://books.google.com/books ]. They showed that large schools had a similar number of behavior settings to small schools. The consequence of this is that students could take many different roles in small schools (e.g. be in the school band and the school football team) but in larger schools there was a tendency to select more highly. This thus was one of the first really insightful explanation of why organisations tend to be less satisfying for their members as they increase in size.
Dr. Barker died at his home in Oskaloosa, Kansas in September 1990. He was survived by his wife, Louise Shedd Barker, with whom he collaborated on much of his research.[1]