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This paper introduces a special issue of the journal Personal Relationships dealing with context and relationships. It reflects on the state of the literature and discusses five approaches to the interplay of context and relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growth of research on social support has led to a comparable proliferation in the ways it is conceptualized and operationalized. The overall purpose of the present paper was to bring some clarity to this concept by critically examining how it has been presented in the literature and by proposing both rationally and empirically derived typologies for organizing social support functions. From a review of prominent discussions of support functions, a rational typology was proposed that included six categories: Material Aid, Behavioral Assistance, Intimate Interaction, Feedback, and Positive Social Interaction. To empirically examine the structure of social support, a factor analysis was conducted on items from a scale of socially supportive behaviors. The four factors that subsequently emerged were labeled Directive Guidance, Nondirective Support, Positive Social Interaction, and Tangible Assistance. Application of these findings to the assessment of support and future research on support/wellbeing relationships were discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the nature of educational studies is considered and discussed. Following some introductory comments, the paper deals with philosophy, psychology and sociology in relation to education. This is followed by a section on social psychology and the paper ends with a section on the history of education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Moscovici has ushered in the 'era of social representations', widely welcomed as a European alternative to what are increasingly regarded as the shortcomings of mainline' American social psychology. The rapid and enthusiastic adoption by many psychologists of Moscovici's theoretical approach has not so far evoked a great deal of critical appraisal of the ideas he put forward. The present paper seeks to make a start in filling this gap by an examination of the conceptual structure and sonic of its underlying assumptions. There appear to be a number of internal inconsistencies and some doubt concerning the logical status of social representations'. It is suggested that clarification of such issues, together with the establishment of closer links with the findings of neighbouring disciplines, would help to strengthen what is undoubtedly one of the most stimulating new departures in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psychological inquiry into social phenomena has become virtually indistinguishable from controlled experimentation. Although the assets and liabilities of psychological experiments have been subject to periodic debate, a continued increase in the reliance placed on experiments is evidenced. The present paper re-examines the adequacy of experimentation in light of major features of social interaction. Significant failures of the experiment emerge when the following characteristics of social events are considered: their imbeddedness in broader cultural patterns, their position within extended sequences, their open competition within real-life settings, their reliance on psychological confluences, and their complex determination. The additional consideration of social phenomena within historical context indicates that all reasonable hypotheses are valid and that critical testing between hypotheses about social behaviour is fruitless. Criteria for the productive usage of experiments are detailed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past few years a diverse group of community-oriented individuals from academic and applied settings has scheduled regular meetings at different universities. This group, officially called the Midwestern Eco-Community Psychology Interest Group, has provided an important source of support to individuals with community interests. The present paper describes the evolution of this group and presents survey data suggesting that this developing network has successfully facilitated the exchange of resources and information among members. The implications of these findings for developing networks for community psychologists are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beneficial and detrimental correlates of interpersonal disagreement have been postulated and documented. The conclusion: conflict is both bad and good. The evidence for these paradoxical effects is summarized. In this article, we argue that the consequences of conflict for individuals depend on its frequency, the way in which it is managed, and the quality of the relationship in which it arises. Non-linear patterns of association are hypothesized such that constructive conflicts, particularly those arising in supportive relationships, should (up to a limit) predict more beneficial and fewer detrimental outcomes. In contrast, coercive conflicts, particularly those arising in unsupportive relationships, should predict more adverse and fewer favorable outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Obedience has been thoroughly studied in social psychology, both in its positive and negative aspects. Nevertheless, in these empirical studies disobedience has been considered to be the opposite of obedience and indeed its negation. Instead, some recent studies suggest that if obedience to authority is important in ensuring the continuity of social and group life, disobedience is crucial, under some circumstances, in stopping the authority relationship from degenerating into an authoritarian relationship. In this perspective, disobedience may be conceived of as a protest undermining the legitimacy of authority, or else it can represent an instrument of the community for controlling the legitimacy of the authority's demands, becoming a factor safeguarding against authoritarianism. The aim of the present study was to empirically verify the dynamics existing between disobedience and obedience. The results show that people who attach importance to both obedience and disobedience in the relationship between the individual and society recognize the importance of democratic values and consider themselves responsible for the defence of human rights. Instead, people who only recognize the value of obedience and consider disobedience as a threat to the status quo are more authoritarian, individualistic people. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study examined whether personal engagement in a leadership course would predict rated performance for the course, and whether qualitative overload would moderate the relationship. Participants were Army Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) cadets participating in a 5-week long leadership assessment course. Participants completed measures of qualitative overload (the extent to which they felt they lacked the skills and expertise required for effective performance) and the degree to which they were engaged in the course during the 4th week. Results revealed that course engagement was a significant predictor of rated leadership performance, even after controlling for the personality variable of conscientiousness. Course engagement interacted with qualitative overload to predict rated performance, indicating that qualitative overload was a stronger predictor of rated performance for those cadets engaged in the course. Discussion of the results focuses on engagement as a predictor of performance, and how work-related impediments matter more for engaged individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Self-disclosure has long been a site of research in clinical and social psychology, where it suffers the fate of many interactional phenomena. It is operationalized (typically, into a set of bald statements of varying intimacy), and measured as a dependent variable (subject to the operation of factors like the age or gender of the discloser, the degree of acquaintance with the disclosed-to recipient, the expectation of reciprocity and so on), or manipulated as a causative independent variable (which affects such things as the perception of the discloser, the effectiveness of therapy, and so on). This treatment of self-disclosure, embedded in a research culture of a-contextual, experimenter-defined phenomena, risks missing the point that in ordinary life, self-disclosure is a social performance which must be brought off in interaction, and has its interactional context and its interactional consequences. When we examine examples of such brought-off disclosures, we start to see patterns in their design as voluntary revelations of personal data, and patterns in their social function, which are invisible to the standard factors and measures paradigm of experimental social psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A typology of five bases of social power developed by French and Raven (1959) has been used to study small-group behavior in field settings by various researchers but interpretation of these data is limited by several methodological shortcomings. This study describes the development and testing of questionnaire measures for the Legitimate, Expert, Referent, Reward, and Coercive bases of social power and attempts to correct some of the scale format confounds that have affected previous empirical efforts. Analyses of Likert-scaled responses from the 23-item questionnaire show for the first time that these five constructs are factorially identifiable and orthogonal. Scale responses are shown to accurately reflect hierarchical status differences in an organization and to correlate significantly with such common leader behaviors as Initiation of Structure and Consideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reviews, compares and evaluates a self-justification and a decision theoretical conceptualization of equity. It is argued that the latter approach reveals an important and often neglected distinction between equity as a goal of social interaction and equity as an interpersonal strategy employed in the pursuit of other valued goals. Associated problems of definition and measurement are discussed. After a review of relevant research it is concluded that equity' serves predominantly as an accommodative interpersonal strategy, and that future research should focus on analyzing the various functional bases' of equity, their relationships, and their effects on behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]