JOCRF is in a unique position as a research organization because our clients are our research participants.
The majority of academic psychological research is done on the convenience sample of college students who are in Psychology 101 classes. Generally this limitation is acknowledged and yet tolerated. Research studies on adults who are in their early, mid, or late career are highly regarded.
For that reason JOCRF is fortunate to have such a wide and deep “basin” of data from thousands of past client-participants. Our tests are evaluated and age-normed upon those thousands of adults both young and old. Each person who has tested with JOCRF was given each test by a trained test administrator or aptitude consultant. The sheer number of individuals who have been baffled by the Wiggly Block or breezed through Ideaphoria is more than a hundred thousand. Our research database of test scores is immense. And yet each individual has a story, and with those stories, our knowledge of aptitudes grows.
Part of growing that knowledge is following-up with clients after they have tested with us. Our program of follow-up questionnaires is seeking to learn about clients both in the short term and in the long term. In one study of our oldest clients, we heard from an individual who had been tested by Johnson O’Connor himself, and another who was tested in 1936 and became an architect.
We are following-up with clients ten years after they have been tested, considering that they will most likely be established in any career choices in the ten years since learning about their aptitudes.
We are following-up with clients five years after testing, with the idea that for the many students that we test, they are likely to have recently graduated from college, and are making early career choices, potentially with their aptitudes in mind.
We are also following-up one year after testing, to learn the short term influence of testing.
We hope to keep our database of contact information up to date, so that these important follow-up questionnaires can reach as many past clients as possible. Please keep in touch and let us know if you have moved or changed e-mail addresses. Past clients are our foundation.
The notion of Big Data is currently popular, and while our dataset is indeed “big,” we balk at the notion of examining any and all correlations in the data. Our research department members have a background in psychological science and an understanding of “what has been done before.”
Research is a process, or a living thing that must be fed and cultivated and pruned. Hypotheses are arrived at after considering what we already know about people and cognition—studies are done to better understand the performance of individual test items, or what aptitudes go together for a certain occupational field. Hypotheses are theory driven, and when they are not supported, we move on and are informed by our failures. The branch is trimmed, and then another branch of hypotheses is explored.
Like an oak tree, the research at JOCRF is broad and strong, living and growing.