Psychology of Space Exploration
scorer analyzes a percentage of the same passages to ensure interscorer reliability.
Thus, from a qualitative (e.g., narrative) database, quantitative data are generated
in a scientifically rigorous way and statistical analyses are made possible.^32
The issue of accuracy always arises in retrospective materials, usually from two
perspectives. One is the exactness of memory; the other is the possibility of impres-
sion management. In the current study, precision probably varied as a function of
time since the experience (among other variables), which itself varied from very
little, as in the Life magazine interviews of the first Mercury astronauts, to years in
the case of book-length memoirs. In any case, the question of how precisely the
narrators remembered events is not of critical importance to this study: we were
not interested in compiling a history of their experiences, but rather in the emo-
tions and motives that were associated with the events and that emerged during
recall. As for impression management, although this is a likely mediating vari-
able in any self-descriptive human narrative, the TCA scoring criteria are not very
transparent, and the material includes a number of cross-checks (e.g., prepared ver-
sus spontaneous remarks). Many of the narratives included negative reflections on
both other people and the narrator himself (or herself), and stories by several par-
ticipants in the same event showed substantial differences, so at least the attempt
to make oneself (or one’s colleagues or one’s agency) look good did not swamp all
other considerations, and there was no evidence of externally imposed uniformity
in the accounts.
MethodThe current study applied TCA scoring methods to a collection of memoirs,
interviews, and oral histories originated by 63 astronauts and cosmonauts. The
overwhelming majority of U.S. and Soviet/Russian participants were in the cat-
egories that NASA considers professional astronauts: pilots and mission special-
ists. The few exceptions were “spaceflight participants”: individuals flown for some
goal such as public relations. No “space tourists” (i.e., individuals who were allowed
- C. P. Smith, J. W. Atkinson, and D. C. McClelland, eds. Motivation and Personality:
Handbook of Thematic Content Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).