Personal Project Pursuit
eBook - ePub

Personal Project Pursuit

Goals, Action, and Human Flourishing

Brian R. Little, Katariina Salmela-Aro, Susan D. Phillips, Brian R. Little, Katariina Salmela-Aro, Susan D. Phillips

Share book
  1. 462 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Personal Project Pursuit

Goals, Action, and Human Flourishing

Brian R. Little, Katariina Salmela-Aro, Susan D. Phillips, Brian R. Little, Katariina Salmela-Aro, Susan D. Phillips

Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

Personal Project Pursuit is the first book to feature Brian Little's highly respected personal projects analysis (PPA), one of the pioneering theories in contemporary personality and motivational psychology. The book examines both the internal and external dynamics of personal goals and projects and clearly demonstrates that human flourishing is enhanced when individuals are engaged in the pursuit of personal projects.The book opens with the theory and methodologies of personal projects research. The historical perspective on the development of the two dominant research perspectives from personality and developmental psychologyis explored. Section II examines the internal dynamics and competing demands of goal formulation and project inception. The third part accentuates the role that social ecologies play in shaping the nature and outcomes of personal projects. These chapters highlight the importance of interpersonal relationships, organizational contexts, and the societal and cultural expectations in affecting the pursuit of personal projects. Ideas for orchestrating theenvironment to enhance human flourishing are explored. Section IV demonstrates how personal projects can illuminate and enhance human flourishing, from psychological well being to physical health. The book concludes withapplications for enhancing human flourishing from individual counseling to public policy. Personal Project Pursuit is intended for advanced students, researchers, and practitioners in personality, social, developmental, industrial/organizational, health, environmental, clinical and counseling psychology interested in motivation and well being. An excellent supplemental text for courses on personality, motivation, positive psychology, well being, personal and life span development, the book's applied focus will appeal to counselors and rehabilitation/occupational therapists.

Frequently asked questions

How do I cancel my subscription?
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Personal Project Pursuit an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Personal Project Pursuit by Brian R. Little, Katariina Salmela-Aro, Susan D. Phillips, Brian R. Little, Katariina Salmela-Aro, Susan D. Phillips in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Medizin & Psychiatrie & geistige Gesundheit. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Year
2017
ISBN
9781351554558

I

Personal Project Pursuit: Theoretical and Methodological Foundations

images

1

Prompt and Circumstance: The Generative Contexts of Personal Projects Analysis

Brian R. Little
I want to discuss the circumstances that prompted the development of personal projects analysis as a line of inquiry and how these influences shaped this book. In a sense I want to examine the personal projects underlying personal projects, but how best to go about this? I could summarize the theoretical and empirical articles written over the past three decades, but that would be redundant with published re-views on how the concept of personal projects applies to areas such as personality and environment (Little, 1983,1987b, 2000a), life-span development (Little, 1987a, 1999a), studies of the self and identity (Little, 1993), and clinical diagnosis and counseling (Little & Chambers, 2000, 2004). Alternatively, I could reconstruct a chronology of the orderly sequence through which the concept, beginning in the late 1960s, developed over the years, framing it as the inexorable progression of a compelling logic. However, that would be misleading. In reality, as with many protracted intellectual endeavors, the development of projects analysis and the coming together of this volume were, in many ways, the products of fortuitous prompts, chance encounters, productive misunderstandings, and inchoate ideas wrestled into coherence, sometimes decades after their initial impetus. So another type of introduction is required, one that has not been written before but that provides a sequential and reasonably coherent account of the personal projects perspective.1
What follows, therefore, is a highly selective recounting of the generative contexts that shaped the development of personal projects analysis and consequently this volume. Because the contexts that stimulate and sustain projects are a core focus of the personal projects approach to studying lives, this seems an appropriately reflexive way to proceed (Bannister, 1966). Also, my students inform me that this way of telling the story gives them an inside feel for what our research is all about. Writing the chapter from this perspective also allows me to acknowledge influences that have shaped my research over the years. These include fortuitous events, evocative institutions, and stimulating individuals. Both goodwill and good luck figure in the story.2
The chapter is in two sections. The opening section is an idiosyncratic account of the roots of the personal projects perspective in which I revisit the scholarly settings and generative contexts that stimulated its core concepts. Although there is a certain degree of arbitrariness and potential distortion in reconstructing the early influences on my work, particularly errors of omission, I have tried to render the account with fidelity. The second section gathers up these cumulative concepts and gives them a more formal treatment. I define and lay out the central notions of the personal projects perspective and the social ecological framework that, together, inform aspects of this book. I give particular attention to an enduring theme throughout my work over the years and developed again in many of the following chapters—how personal projects play a pivotal role in human well-being and flourishing. I also note briefly the similarities and differences between personal projects and related units of analysis in personality and developmental science and other areas of research and practice. Finally, I stand back and, from a more synoptic vantage point, discern some patterns that have become clearer as the projects perspective has been adopted and adapted by others. In conclusion, I suggest some consequences that this still moving image has both for the study of lives and for attempts to enhance their vitality.

Personal Projects as Analytic Units: Roots, Routes, and Randomness

The origins of research and theory on personal projects go back more than 30 years and involve several different intellectual influences. Some of these arose directly from my experiences in various scholarly institutions and behavior settings. Others were carried from setting to setting as enduring personal preferences, the most compelling of which has been an irrepressible desire to connect, link, and integrate diverse forms of inquiry: to rub ideas together and, particularly with highly combustible students, to create sparks and see what ensues.

Classical Personology: Snow Flurries, Murray, and Synoptic Visions

C. P. Snow’s (1959) published Rede lecture on “The Two Cultures” had a major impact on me as an undergraduate in the early 1960s. Snow, a chemist and novelist, concluded that a growing gap between scientists and humanists was becoming unbridgeable and that the implications for society were ominous. I was struck by Snow’s argument for the tension between the sciences and the humanities but even more by the acrimony that greeted the argument. After a few flurries of disagreement there was a blizzard of ad hominem abuse directed back at Snow, who was seen by some (e.g., Leavis, 1963) as unfit to pronounce on such matters: lacking, it was alleged, distinction in either domain. This seemed much more than an academic disagreement. It reflected fundamental differences in orientation, in committed preferences, in ideology, in preferred modes of knowing and communicating, and in core beliefs about the quality of life and lives. As I had strong interests in both the sciences and the humanities, I vacillated between them before eventually discovering psychology. I was hopeful that this could be a field in which the two cultures might be bridged and creative synergies between the sciences and the humanities might be achieved (Little, 1972, 2005).3
One day in the spring of 1961,1 chanced upon a rather tattered copy of Henry A. Murray’s (1938) Explorations in Personality in a shop in Victoria, British Columbia, and bought it for 25 cents. I was intrigued by how Murray’s Psychological Clinic at Harvard had been engaged in the interdisciplinary analysis of human personality that directly met some of the challenges posed by Snow. In essence, Murray’s vision was for a psychology that looked at individual personality from the perspective of many different researchers, working separately, who then came together in diagnostic councils or assessment panels and attempted to create an integrative picture of the person. It was the diversity of back-grounds of those who contributed to this assessment that was remarkable. They came from the entire spectrum of the academic and artistic community Indeed, in the preface to the volume, Murray (1938) acknowledged both this diversity and the difficulties in finding a common language: “It is true that we never completely succeeded in merging our separate Ideologies. How could such a thing come to pass in a group composed of poets, physicists, sociologists, anthropologists, criminologists, physicians... ?” (p. xi). That he aspired at all to bring these different specialists to the table was audacious, although not surprising considering Murray’s professional background. After undergraduate study in history, Murray went into medicine, practiced surgery, took a PhD in biochemistry, and achieved fame as a literary scholar, particularly for his research on Herman Melville. Here, clearly, was a person driving projects designed to confront and survive Snow storms. I would later come to believe bridging between the disciplines would require more than the bringing together of different specialists. It would require, as Murray’s illustrious colleague at Harvard, Gordon Allport (1937, 1958) argued, appropriate units of analysis that facilitate interdisciplinary analysis. Nevertheless, Murray’s integrative vision for what he called personology was to infuse my research for decades.4
Murray became best known for his multiform assessment approach, his weaving of Jungian unconscious themes into the field of personality and for the measurement of needs and corresponding environmental “press” in the study of motivation. Although this was fascinating, there was another aspect of his work that intrigued me more. Like Allport, Murray was uncomfortable with the reactive model that the stimulus-response theory of the day espoused. In-stead, he posited that much of our behavior comprises what he called serials, temporally extended enterprises that typically involve acting on a concern, possibly setting it aside and returning to it until it was completed or abandoned. These sets of behavior make sense only through understanding the internally generated aspirations guiding their enactment. He described the nature of these stimulus-free pursuits as proactive.5 Murray’s concept of serials prompted me to speculate on how we might assess and explore these extended sets of personally salient action. However, that prompt lay dormant for a decade until I wrote my first article on a method for assessing “personal projects” (Little, 1983). That article began with an explicit acknowledgment of serials as a generative concept that had been essentially uncharted because, unlike many of Murray’s other constructs, it lacked a compelling assessment instrument through which it could be explored.
Although I first met personology through reading Murray, my later exposure would be more direct, as a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley Here, at the Institute for Personality Assessment and Research (IPAR), the personological tradition was being vigorously extended under the leadership of Donald MacKinnon. This Harvard-Berkeley axis of personology would subsequently play a key role in the development of personal projects research, albeit one that unfolded in a rather peculiar and unexpected series of fortunate events.6

George Kelly and the Partially Prepare d Mind

In a fascinating article, Bandura (1982) examined the role that chance could play in the course of life development and on its relative neglect in psychological theories. He also explicitly discussed its relevance to the trajectory of academic careers, noting that two people, who just happened to sit next to each other at the convention where he first presented this idea, ended up getting married (to each other). The sequence of events leading to the unfolding of the personal projects perspective amply supports the influence of chance and fortuity in scholarly inquiry (see also Campbell, 1981).
At the time I was applying to graduate school I was convinced that neuropsychology was the route for me and I had been lucky enough, as an undergraduate at the University of Victoria in Canada, to be a re-search assistant in one of the first clinical neuropsychology laboratories focused primarily on children. I was attracted by the fun of helping de-sign and build the equipment and calibrate the instruments for neuropsychological assessment and by the elegance of experimentation that the field required. That clinical neuropsychology could contribute to the amelioration of human suffering also mattered a lot. One day I was looking for the Stereotaxic Atlas of the Brain in the college library when I pulled down a misshelved copy of George Kelly’s (1955) Psychology of Personal Constructs. It was a massive two-volume work on human personality. Having been at least partially prompted for “personality psychology” by reading Murray, I thought I would take a quick skim through Kelly. About 5 hours later and rather stiff from sitting squat-legged on the library floor, I was hooked. Kelly wrote as if he were sitting on the floor alongside me, chatting amicably with a fellow scientist, a stance that happened to reflect exactly Kelly’s core assumption about the everyday people he studied (Bannister, 1966; Kelly, 1955).
Kelly’s writing style was engaging and his content was iconoclastic. He held that most personality, clinical, and motivational theories were based on untenable assumptions. They assumed that people are primarily passive creatures, buffeted about by the vicissitudes of reinforcement or the prodding of unconscious forces. Kelly took a different view, which, although in the spirit of Allport and Murray, was more radical. He saw each person as a lay scientist who erects and tests hypotheses, revises them in the light of experience, and generally engages life in an anticipatory instead of reactive mode. The means through which individuals experience their worlds are personal constructs, essentially conceptual templates or goggles through which people idiosyncratically view the constantly changing contexts of daily life. Even emotional concerns could be addressed through invoking an individual’s personal construct system: Anxiety is becoming aware that an event is outside the range of convenience of one’s constructs; guilt is awareness of being dislodged from a core role construct; and hostility is the attempt to extort validation for a construct or hypothesis one already suspects has been disconfirmed.
My discovering Kelly as I did was most certainly a chance encounter, albeit one I was moved to pursue by having read Murray. Pasteur’s dictum about chance favoring the prepared mind, or in my case the partially prompted one, continued to ring true, as another serendipitous event soon followed. Norah Carlsen, a faculty member, was looking for a research assistant to help her complete her doctoral dissertation on cognitive complexity as measured by Kelly’s repertory grid technique. This time I was fully Pasteurized. I quickly devoured everything I could on measuring people’s personal constructs, established contact with Kelly, began doing nonparametric factor analyses by hand, received copies of his Ohio State students’ dissertations, and realized I was becoming a true personal construct theorist. I was also experiencing true cognitive dissonance because, while I was in the process of becoming a committed Kellian, I was busing to Berkeley to study brains.

Berkeley: Persons, Places, and Passion

Just a few days after I arrived at the University of California in 1964, the free speech movement began and a new era of activism was unleashed. It had a subtle and enduring influence on me. The campus radicals were viewed by some faculty (none, so far as I knew, in the Department of Psychology) as merely engaged in Oedipal struggles with the university patriarchy, a view I thought patently absurd. I became even more strongly committed to the solicitous but sophisticated Kellian stance toward explaining human conduct. This approach begins by giving initial credence to individuals’ personal accounts of what they are doing. The eventual course of inquiry may well discover inconsistencies, distortions, and self-delusion, but attempts to directly solicit accounts of why students did not want to be “folded, mutilated, or bent” like mistreated computer cards seemed more constructive than dismissing their dissent as the mere eruption of primitive unconscious processes. Once again, just as with the reaction to Snow’s two cultures argument, I realized that academic institutions and human personalities could collide with in-credible force. Along with the political ferment, there was a confluence of intellectual forces that shaped the personal projects perspective in ways that, I realize in retrospect, were pivotal. Despite a lingering affinity for neuropsychology, and pa...

Table of contents