Researching William Stephenson

As head of the British Security Coordination, Stephenson handed over British scientific secrets to Franklin D. Roosevelt and relayed American secrets to Winston Churchill. In addition, Stephenson has been credited with changing American public opinion from an isolationist stance to a supportive tendency regarding America's entry into World War II.

He was born in England and trained in physics at the University of Oxford and Durham University (where he earned a Ph.D. in 1926). His interest in research methods in physics and complementarity led him to an increased interest in psychology. This resulted in his studying at University College London under Charles Spearman, a pioneer of factor analysis. While there he also worked with Cyril Burt. Stephenson received his second Ph.D., in psychology, in 1929.

Stephenson is most known for his development of an alternative form of factorial analysis concerned with the operationalizing of subjectivity, Q methodology. At the same time as he published his first paper on Q methodology in Nature in 1935, he was in analysis with Melanie Klein (in 1935-36), as part of a project initiated by the British Psycho-Analytic Society to promote research on psychoanalysis within academic psychology.

In 1936 he became the assistant director of Oxford's Institute of Experimental Psychology.

During the Second World War he joined the British military and was promoted to the rank of Brigadier General, serving in India.

After the war he briefly returned to Oxford but left in 1948 for the University of Chicago. It was while he was at Chicago that he published The Study of Behavior: Q-Technique and Its Methodology (1953), the work for which he is best known and the definitive treatise on the research procedure.

In 1955 he left the University of Chicago, and academia, to accept a position as director of advertising research for Nowland and Company. His time in the advertising world, though successful, was short-lived, and he returned to academia in 1958, accepting a position as a distinguished professor in the University of Missouri School of Journalism. He retired from Missouri in 1974 but accepted a position as a visiting professor at the University of Iowa where he served until a second retirement in 1977.

After retirement he continued to write on his interest in the subject of the study of subjectivity until his death in 1989 at the age of 87 (Barchak, 1991).

He started work as a printer and soon opened his own business at the Bridge End, Gateshead.

Much of his business seemed to come from the cheap chapbooks, song slips, many to the hawkers together with last dying confessions; these seem to be the objects which keep turning up in collections. Shortly after closure of The Gateshead Intelligencer, he gave up his printing work and became an auctioneer.

On his death, the Gateshead Observer of 26 May 1838 carried a notice which read “On Sunday (May 20), after a long illness, aged 40, much respected, Mr. W. Stephenson, printer"