Research Implications of a Field View of Personality

Abstract

Developing an adequate theory of personality, and research procedures competent to test and extend it, is one of the most challenging tasks faced by social science today. Progress has been blocked by the tendency to extend the concepts and research designs of psychology or of sociology-which are abstract disciplines-to explain behavior in its full empirical manifestations. We can avoid the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness" by specifying clearly the abstract quality of purely psychological or sociological research and, when our concern is with behavior, by developing a model that takes account simultaneously of individual tendencies and structural influences. This proposition is illustrated by reference to the study of abnormal behavior and the question of personality continuity.