Social Psychology of Relationships by Leon James and Diane Nahl

Longitudinal Studies of Personality, Biography, and Psychohistory or, The Social Psychology of Relationship. It is told that Francis Bacon, the "Founder of the Experimental Method in Science" at the close of the "Dark Age" in Sixteenth Century Christian Europe, pondered the problem of human dispositions and concluded that it is "one of those things wherein the common discourse of men is wiser than books -- a thing which seldom happens. 11 According to two sages of Social Psychology, Gordon W. Allport and Henry S. Odbert (1936), who mention Bacon's conclusion, "common discourse" assumes a "close correspondence between linguistic symbols and personal qualities" (p. 4). The new paradigm in social psychology discussed in Sections [8. 1] and [8. 2] above, also takes this position on "accounts," viewing them as an empirical source for the social psychology of community and everyday life. Thus, ordinary language philosophy, the ethnomethodological study of accounts, the daily round approach, and the social psychology of trait-names, are various empirical approaches we have available for the social psychological study of personality.

Allport and Odbert's (1936) "psycho- lexical" study of trait-names is a compilation of over 17, 000 names in ordinary discourse usage. They are listed in four columns as follows:

In the history of psychology, the school known as "Faculty Psychology" is associated with many similar attempts to list personality traits. Popular psychology also involves the enumeration of traits and dispositions in such areas as astrology, handwriting analysis, phrenology, and so on. Faculty psychology has its current and modernized version in the field of psychological testing (personality, diagnosis, intelligence, achievement, etc.).

A central issue in these efforts on the empirical and experimental study of personality is that of the permanence of traits and dispositions. Some are considered 'stable features' of an individual's conduct while others are momentary or situational. This distinction is represented in Columns 1 vs. 2 of the Allport/ Odbert classification. Methodological approaches to the investigation of this basic issue include the cataloguing of trait-names culled from dictionaries, thesauruses, lexical inventories, and mood check-lists filled out by a person in the course of a day.

A second basic issue concerns the overlap or distributional patterns of trait-names such that they are seen to cluster into groupings or factors on the basis of similarity of meaning and usage. Here, the methods employed include semantic analysis, word categorization judgments by raters, and statistical techniques of cluster and factor analysis.

The study of personality and its relevance to the objective study of biography or "psychohistory" brings out a third basic issue, that of the sociofunctional value of particular trait-name descriptions of an individual's conduct. Here, we encounter such issues as the morality or ethics of behavior and their role in mediating relationship events.

It is an odd fact that the word relationship is not commonly used in the contemporary literature in social psychology, clinical psychology, and personality theory. The word does not appear in textbooks devoted to these topic domains. The Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms (APA, 1974), which searches terms used in Psychological Abstracts, has the entry RELATIONSHIP THERAPY, which is listed as a sub-category of PSYCHOTHE RA PIES, along with such types of therapies as FAMILY THERAPY, ENCOUNTER GROUP THERAPY, BEHAVIOR THERAPY, PSYCHOANALYSIS, etc. This indicates that the term "relationship therapy" is the name of a particular technique in clinical psychology rather than a general term in the ordinary language uses:

Looking at social psychology texts specializing in human interactions we find such terms as "intergroup relations," "interaction process," "secondary relations," (Harrison, 1976); "interpersonal attachments," "human relationships," (Sampson, 1971); "social exchange," "transactional approach to communication," "human relationship" (Hollander, 1976). The term "relationship" does not appear in the Index of these books, as well a sample of other contemporary texts.

The fact that these specialists of "the human interaction process" do not use relationship as a topical focus, in the manner of other terms that are used such as "interaction," "transaction," "reciprocity in liking," and so on, indicate something interesting about the character of contemporary experimental social psychology, and to a similar extent, the character of scientific clinical psychology. The perspective or orientation of the dominant "experimental/scientific" enterprise is distinctly different from the orientation that we ourselves were lead to as a result of our study of the natural history of the daily round. Rather than "interactions" and "interactional processes of attribution and judgment, 11 which are views from the experimentalist camp, we see ATTRIBUTION, ASSESSMENT, JUDGMENT (etc.), as transactional exchanges, and even as "interactional processes," but not as relationship, per se. In other words, to us, the concept of relationship is to be placed at the same theoretical level as identity, biography, reputation, psychohistory, role enactment, and others. Relationship is, therefore, not an interactional process; rather, it is a frame for these.

The key notion that establishes REIATIONSHIP as a frame or context for behavioral interactions is the concept of EPISODE, as developed formally in the work of ethnomethodological sociology and ethnography in anthropology. An episode is defined as the daily round unit of social interactions and transactions. It is important to realize that without the prior creation or formal definition, of a social unit that frames the events that we term "social interactions," one cannot logically speak of any features of these events. As a matter of fact, textbook writers in social psychology use such frame-terms as "human relationships," "social background, and "situation." These frame-terms act as context for discussing "interaction processes," but they are left outside the experimental/scientific framework. In effect, they are taking the position that social psychology for now must remain rigorous inside and work with an undefined outside that is presumed operative and already familiar to the reader/student. We are attempting to discard this strategy which we shall call textbookitis.

Textbookitis has been the butt of much recent criticism in American education. Studies tend to show that students no longer read much of the original writings of the thinkers of our society. Instead, people's knowledge tend tends to be a conglomeration of secondary and tertiary sources. The textbook industry has fostered an educational philosophy that sees textbook writers as creative synthetic saviors of the scattered and confusing literature. Many writers indicate that they view their textbooks as a coherent synthesis, even if not completely coherent or complete. The latter justification rationalizes, among others, the illogical sequence of formal theoretical work in much of the current experimental social psychology on human relationships. We feel that our proposal rectifies the sequence by providing a formalized frame that constitutes the functional rationale in observations on interactional events.

Our proposal also opens up interesting theoretical questions concerning the background context of human relationships. Note that it is usual to find relationship in plural. This indicates that the focus is on the recurrence of dyadic instances of relationship, rather than on the phenomenon of relationship itself. For example, experimental studies on "liking behavior" and "interpersonal attraction," cited frequently and at length in current textbooks, focus on instances of behaviors that fall in these categories choosing someone for a partner or rating others on a scale). They leave unexamined the nature of such acts as choosing or rating: they consider only the parameters that can be shown to influence these acts. This would be similar to the distinction we recognize in consumers' reports that test out the products or machines sold on the market, versus what we find, in engineering or mechanics manuals outlining the procedures for creating the products. The latter specifies what the former leaves unexamined.

Similarly, we argue that the theory of relationship in a social psychology that is oriented towards a description of the natural history of community ought to begin with a formal frame that defines relationship within its own immediate frame on the daily round. As such, we define relationship as the functional state of contact between the individuals forming a community. The formal properties of relationship, thus defined can now be given:

(P_l): Relationship, or the functional state of contact between individuals who share a daily round, is always episodic; that is, all behaviors that are indices of interpersonal contact occur within a minimal social unit on the daily round called an episode. Episodes are formally specified structural units: they have an exact location in the daily round sequence and they are marked off as to where they begin and where they end. This is understandable since otherwise people wouldn't be able to keep track of events or adjust to changes as events succeed one another. Methodologically, episodes are clearly marked off in records of behavior. For example, receiving a letter is an episode whose natural boundaries are marked by the procedures attendant to enclosing the contents in an envelope or other external frame, which in turn has its community practices of handling. In transcripts, an episode is clearly marked as a segment of talking turns among adjacent segments. In transactional exchanges, episodes are sequences of turn-taking procedures.

(P₂): Relationship is always transactional. This provides an outside rationale for the dynamic features of relationship. As discussed in a number of places in this Workbook (see CHART T/2 in Index), the dynamic components underlying social exchange mechanisms are of two types: psychodynamic and ethnodynamic.

The psychodynamic components are activated by a symbolic value logic which occasions such acts as attribution, assessment, and judgment. The value logic of psychodynamics is clearly recognized in experimental social psychology where attitudes, values, opinions, choices, evaluations, and the like, are treated as bi-polar phenomenal processes agree/disagree, like/dislike, etc.) enacted ritually by participants. For example, exchanging greetings with a classmate is an episode that always starts, proceeds, then ends; sub-episodes may be optionally embedded; for instance, when you arrange for meeting later in between the "Hi", and the "See you later."

Episodes are to be investigated empirically and their actual structural characteristics identified within the natural history account of a person's daily round and larger biography. These investigations would reveal the local community practices attendant to episodic exchanges on the daily round.

The ethnodynamic: components are activated by a natural morphological system of developmental stages. That is, the transactional dynamics of relationship entails natural phases of evolution such that relationship events are functionally conditioned by their sequentiality from the first episode to subsequent episodes, giving us the rationale for distinguishing such natural paired states as "friends," "acquaintances," and "strangers." The methodological investigation of the phases of evolution in relationship is pursued through the analysis of transactional exchanges, and particularly, the rank ordering of these in terms of a standardized or conventionalized ordering. Here one will note that some relationship events, such as mentioning an intimate fact, come after other transactions such as, introductions and the mentioning of biographical, public facts. Empirical investigation must identify the actual ordering of relationship events given particular, local, community practices.

One approach we are attempting currently, in the analysis of transcripts, is the identification of objectified procedures for determining the ethnodynamic, transactional functions of moves and sub-moves within talking turns. That is, each move that is isolated in the structural analysis of episodes (P_l) is indexed according to its implications, presuppositions, and meanings. To give a simple instance, the move contained in "I see that you are a very active person" yields the following:

Note (by looking at CHART T/2, Chapter 10) that each of the three ethnodynamic components relate to three psychodynamic components:

This functional relation among the two types of dynamic transactional components allows a methodological strategy: the empirical study of the symbolic value logic contained in psychodynamic processes through independently defined ethnodynamic conditions.

(P₃): Relationship is topical. This specification pertains to the objective fact that relationship events are referrable through a conventionalized system of ORTHOGRAPHIC collocations. That is, all relationship events involve issues of interpretation, and these issues are investigatable through analyses of topicalizations. Thus, such an item as, "We were talking about Uncle Nate," indexes a relationship event that is distinctly different from the item, "We were talking about football," or, "We were arguing about Uncle Nate's refusal to ever give to charity." The differences are to be specified by reference to such issues of interpretation as, "what we've talked about," or, "what each of us has asserted about it." The empirical investigation of topicalization acts as relationship events leads to techniques such as Topic Domain Methodology and Paragraph Matrix Notation System, both of which we've discussed at length (see Index).

To summarize what we have been discussing, we can refer to the following figure:

This figure shows that relationship is defined as a state of contact containing a triadic aspect: episodic, transactional, and topical. These three primary dimensions of variability jointly and exactly define the structural, dynamic, and thematic components of relationship in each of the three primary dimensions, respectively. Boundary and embedding issues are the current theoretical solutions to the empirical investigation of the structural components of social episodes (T_a and T_b, respectively). Within the transactional dimension, a current theoretical solution is that we have proposed under the rubric of sociodynamics: one type, psycho-dynamics (T_C), concerns the specification of the underlying, psychogenesis of cognitive and symbolic acts; i.e., the details of a symbolic value logic in human affairs. The second type of social dynamic, ethnodynamics (T_d), concerns the specification of the underlying, local ethnicity conditions in ritual exchanges, i.e., the developmental sequence that community practices exhibit or, the stages that are sanctioned in contingency practices.

The thematic aspect of relationship is observable in the third dimension of variability, namely, the topicalization components. Here, the current theoretical solution concerns the specification of issues of interpretation (T_e); these always relate to a criterion based conceptual framework.

As shown in the figure, the methodological strategies (M_a - M_e) currently being pursued in these five theoretical areas (T_a – T_e) include the syntactic description of relationship episodes in terms of moves and sub-moves (M_A and M_b); the coupling of developmental issues to a functional symbolic value logic (M_c and M_d) (also indicated by the double arrows); and the annotation of topics within a conceptual framework that justifies interpretations of events (M_e). Some specific methodological techniques which we are researching are mentioned in the figure. Details on the syntax of moves (M_a and M_b) may be found in Series III, Vol. 1, J. & G., 1975-77, in sections dealing with the functional analysis of conversation; as well, see our earlier discussion on transactional competence in J. & G., 1974. Details on symbolic value logic (M_g) and developmental phases (M_d) will be found in the empirical investigations of Winskowski (1975-78) (and see [8. 3. 5] below). Details on the conceptual framework involved in interpretation (M_e) can be found in Chapter 7, Section [8. 5] of this Chapter, and Chapter 10. For more technical treatments, see Series IV, Vol. 1 for (M_e1) and Series 1, Vol. 2 for (M_e4 and M_e5), all in J. & G., 1975-77).

The various references mentioned here are to our own work. Students would wish to consult as well the works of others. By looking up in the index the entries of ETHNOMETHODOLOGY; ETHOGENIC APPROACH; PERSONALITY; and so on, you will be led to the extensive works of others listed in the References.

Case History Report: Christine Winskowski: The Empirical Investigation of Relationship Dynamics in Conversation

The following is a study by one of our students prepared for a Doctoral Dissertation in the Psychology Department at the University of Hawaii, Social Psychology-Personality Program (see Section [7.4.3] in Chapter 7). The Doctoral Dissertation Committee overseeing this work is composed of Dr. T. Ciborowski, Dr. R. Johnson, Dr. H. Weaver, Dr. S. Boggs (Anthropology), and Dr. L.A. James, Chairman of the Committee and Director of Research.

The theoretical context which motivated us to undertake this research effort has been discussed above, in Section [8.3]. The specific rationale is presented in Winskowski (1978). The following description has been kindly provided by Winskowski for inclusion here.

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