Murray, Henry A., Research Center

The Henry A. Murray Research Center is a national repository for the social and behavioral sciences for the study of lives over time. The center's primary purpose is to facilitate the use of these data to explore human development and social change. To make such research possible, the Murray Center has developed a national archive of data sets, including both quantitative and qualitative data. More than one third of the archive's approximately 280 archived data sets are longitudinal in design, making it a rich resource for developmental researchers. Unique among archives for its commitment to studying women's lives and preserving both computer-accessible quantitative data and qualitative materials, the Murray Center has been a vital contributor to the advancement of the theoretical, methodological, and training dimensions of the study of the human life course since its founding at Radcliffe College in 1976.

The impetus for a social science archive for the study of women's lives over time came from Matina [Page 739]Horner (then associate professor of psychology and social relations at Harvard and president of Radcliffe College, now executive vice president of TIAACREF) at a conference organized by the Ford Foundation. In light of the rapid changes in women's lives during the 1960s and 1970s, the foundation had convened a group of leading scholars to examine how such drastic change had occurred without foresight and preparation by the academic community. Horner traced this failure to the limited number of studies that could be used to track and predict such change, studies that systematically linked social forces with individual trajectories. Further, the few existing studies of this nature had focused exclusively on men. Simply stated, there existed no satisfactory data repository with multiple resources to assess the changing patterns of women's lives through this turbulent era.

After the conference, the Ford Foundation announced a major funding initiative to support the study of women's lives. Horner proposed that the foundation support a project to be based at Radcliffe that would archive reunion surveys from the Seven Sisters colleges. By bringing together and making available reunion data, social scientists would have a resource to compensate for the lack of longitudinal studies of women.

First known as the Radcliffe Data Resource and Research Center, the Murray Research Center was established in 1976 with funding from the Ford Foundation. Abigail Stewart (now professor of psychology at the University of Michigan) served as its first director. Three years later, the center adopted its current name to honor Henry A. Murray, the renowned Harvard psychologist and personality theorist. Murray's emphasis on the in-depth, multidisciplinary study of individual lives over time has continued to inform the center's approach to both its selection of studies for the archive and its commitment to preserving both the quantitative and qualitative components of these studies.

In 1980, Anne Colby (now senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for the Advancement of Teaching) was appointed the director of the center, a position that she held for 18 years. Under Dr. Colby's leadership, the Murray Center expanded its collection from 60 to more than 200 studies, developing particularly strong resources in areas of special interest to women, such as women's work and careers, education, mental health, political participation, family life, widowhood, and aging. It also broadened its mandate to acquire exemplary studies from across the social sciences and research designs, so that the collection today contains studies with both female and male subjects from a wide range of ages and racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic class groups. These data were collected using a variety of methods, including longitudinal, crosssectional, survey, case study, and experimental designs. In keeping with the center's interest in qualitative records, the archive also includes some videotaped and/or audiotaped data.

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