Melvin Lester Kohn (1928-2021) was a sociologist whose studies on occupational conditions and their effect on personality, which combined class analysis with social psychology, helped found the Social Structure and Personality subfield of sociological social psychology. Kohn collaborated with sociologists in the US, Japan, Poland, Ukraine, and China to produce cross-national studies on social structure and personality. His primary collaborator was Carmi Schooler (1933-2018), with whom he worked at the Laboratory of Socio-environmental Studies at NIMH.

Kohn's early work examined parental authority behavior and the relationship between social class and parental values and behaviors. With Schooler, he began to study the relationship between social class, occupation, and personality, beginning with the 1964 NORC occupation study, which was expanded into a longitudinal study in 1974. The Kohn-Schooler model examines social mobility as a function of social class and education, which affect both personality (as measured by intellectual flexibility and self-directedness) and occupation (as measured by occupational complexity); personality and occupation in turn affect each other over time. Later work examined how radical social change affects social structure and personality, focusing on Poland, Ukraine, and China.

Kohn, born in 1928 in New York, studied at Deep Springs College before he was admitted to Cornell University in 1946. After earning his BA in psychology and general studies in 1948, he continued at Cornell for his PhD in sociology, with minors in social psychology and industrial relations, which he completed in 1952. He joined the Laboratory of Socio-environmental Studies at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), and became chief of that lab in 1960. In 1985, he left NIMH to join the Department of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University as a professor. He served as chair of the department between 1996 and 1999, and was designated the William D. and Robin Mayer Distinguished Professor, School of Arts and Sciences, from 2009 until he was named emeritus in 2012. Awards include the Cooley-Mead Award in 1992 and an honorary doctorate at Ukraine’s National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy.

SOURCES 1. Hung, Ho-fung. “Obituaries: Melvin L. Kohn.” Footnotes 49, no. 3, Summer 2021. https://www.asanet.org/footnotes/footnotes-announcements/?issue=why-the-environment-needs-a-course-correction-now#obituaries. 2. Melvin L. Kohn papers, MS-0963, Special Collections, The Johns Hopkins University. 3. Mortimer, Jeylan T. “Melvin L. Kohn: Recipient of the 1992 Cooley-Mead Award.” Social Psychology Quarterly 56, no. 1 (1993): 1–3. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2786641.