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Persons, Contexts, and Personal Projects

Assumptive Themes of a Methodological Transactionalism

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Theoretical Perspectives in Environment-Behavior Research

Abstract

Our research program on personality and social ecology is based explicitly on a set of assumptive propositions about the nature of persons, the nature of contexts, and the transactional features of persons in context (Little, 1976, 1983, 1989; Little & Ryan, 1979). Our perspective shares many of the assumptions of other transactional or social ecological approaches (e.g. Altman & Rogoff, 1987; Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Endler, 1983; Moos, 1973; Wapner, 1987) but those commonalities will not be the primary concern of this chapter. Rather, I wish to emphasize the most distinctive feature of our approach: its emphasis on ways of measuring person-context relations This approach assumes the need for isomorphism between conceptual units of analysis and their measurement operations. This methodological transactionalism is the superordinate assumptive theme in our work and undergirds each of the other core themes to be discussed in this chapter.

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Little, B.R. (2000). Persons, Contexts, and Personal Projects. In: Wapner, S., Demick, J., Yamamoto, T., Minami, H. (eds) Theoretical Perspectives in Environment-Behavior Research. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-4701-3_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-4701-3_8

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4613-7129-8

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