KOHS, SAMUEL CALMIN

KOHS, SAMUEL CALMIN (1890–1984), U.S. social worker and psychologist. Kohs was born in New York City. He began his career as a psychologist with the Portland, Oregon, Court of Domestic Relations (1919–24). In 1925 he founded the Oakland, California, Placement and Guidance Service. He taught at a number of colleges, including Reed College (1918–22) and the University of Oregon extension division (1919–22) and in 1929 returned to New York to serve as chairman of the Department of Social Technology at the Graduate School of Jewish Social Work, a post he held for ten years. In 1929 Kohs also became editor of the Jewish Social Service Quarterly. He served as chairman of the board of directors of *yivo in 1937–40, and from 1938 to 1940 he was director of the Resettlement Division of the National Refugee Service in New York City. In 1940 Kohs was appointed director of the Refugee Service Committee in Los Angeles, where he also did war statistical work for the Jewish Welfare Board. He was the administrative field secretary of its western states section (1941–56), evolving the "distinctive Jewish names" method of identifying Jewish populations for his Jewish War Records of World War ii (1946). Kohs was active in Jewish charity work on the East and West coasts, serving as director of the Jewish Welfare Federation of Oakland, California (1924–26), initiating the first national Jewish welfare fund in 1926, and serving as director of the Federation of Jewish Charities in Brooklyn, New York (1928–33). From 1956 on he served as a consultant in psychological and social services. Kohs' authoritative work ranges over the philosophy of social work, ethnic differentials and value systems, the non-verbal measurement of intelligence and non-verbal manifestations of mental development, and the psychology and education of mentally retarded and physically handicapped children. His Block Design Test, which he introduced in 1918, is incorporated into the Wechsler-Bellevue, one of the most widely used U.S. tests of intelligence, and is employed in testing the blind and determining brain injury. The term "Kohs blocks" has been coined to denote the set of small colored blocks that are used to form test patterns in psychodiagnostic examinations. In 1923 his book Intelligence Measurement: A Psychological and Statistical Study Based Upon the Block-Design Tests was published. Kohs also designed the iq Slide Rule, a device that eliminates the arithmetic computation of the intelligence quotient from chronological and mental age scales.

His Roots of Social Work (1966) emphasizes "the deficiencies of an exclusively secular approach" to social work and suggests that, as the group is the source of values, sectarian differences in approach may contribute to the practice of casework.