Social Structure and the Individual: Emerging Themes and New Directions.

By bringing together a set of papers in the broad social structure and personality tradition of social psychology, this issue of SPQ seeks to manifest its centrality to social psychology, and vice versa. The papers illustrate the utility and necessity of incorporating more careful and more explicit analyses of macrosocial and psychological processes into the study of the relationships of macrosocial structures and processes to the thoughts, feelings, and behavior of individual actors. Relationships between social stratification (by socioeconomic, gender, racial/ethnic, or age status) and the individual and intersections between the domains of work and family emerge as central problems in the study of social structure and personality, and of social psychology, sociology, and psychology more generally. These and other analyses could benefit from increased interplay among the different faces or branches of social psychology and of social psychology with emerging developments in the parent disciplines. The reemergence of the study of personality in psychology, especially from a cognitive perspective, the new concern of sociology with micro-macro links, increased intersections of biology with sociology and psychology, and the increased use of life course perspectives and longitudinal data in psychology and sociology are all developments that could contribute to, and benefit from, future advances in the study of social structure and personality. Each of these trends suggest the need for more attention to the interrelationships between individuals and macrosocial structures or processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]