Last modified: 2010-04-21
Abstract
In Personality psychology – the area of psychology supposed to study persons – “everyday life” has received relatively little attention. While there has been repeated calls for Personality Psychology to study persons’ behavior in real situations (for instance, Funder, 2001; Baumeister, Funder & Vohs, 2005), what persons actually do in their everyday lives is still a neglected area of research in Personality Psychology. Moving “outside” into the “real life” of persons is mostly seen as a methodological matter (Furr, 2009), for instance in order to enhance the validity of generalizations.
In my presentation I will argue that studying the everyday life of persons isn’t mainly a methodological issue, but a theoretical challenge of recognizing the conceptual consequences of the diachronic aspect of everyday life – that persons actually move in and across many different contexts in their everyday lives.
In an attempt to do so, I have in my project studied how situations in persons’ everyday life are experienced, planned, and arranged as part of a “conduct of everyday life” (Holzkamp, 1998; Dreier, 2008). This has been sought done in a combined diary method and time-use questionnaire study, in which participants reported on the episodes of the course of a random work day. This procedure yielded an extensive pool of quantitative information about the experience and configurations of everyday life.
While recognizing that structural or material circumstances constrain and/or afford activities taking place in and across situations, I have focused on the “subjective context” of the situations in the person’s daily trajectory.
By looking at situations as part of the course of a person’s day, the project seeks to shed light upon how situations are linked not just by mere chronology, but by being part of the person’s life course. In order to grasp this “diachronic” aspect of persons’ everyday activities, the project’s empirical material provides information about the relation between “here-and-now” experience and the person’s concerns, commitment, and planning.