Екологичен подход към изследване на индивидуалността

Abstract

The concept of the individual differences appeared together with the idea of personality traits as common dimensions, on which individuals can be compared. However, the person exists and reacts as a whole and no dimensions function in isolation. This requires studying within-the-individual interactions and the new qualities created in the process of these interactions. Treating the person as a list of characteristics falls into contradiction of the real life behaviour of human beings. To produce an adequate picture, the scientific study of the person could follow the way real people do when studying the individuality of other people. One does not evaluate the other person on a list of predetermined dimensions, the real people observe other person’s behaviour, look for meaningful patterns and give labels to the pattern, using natural language. In essence, the same path should be followed by an ecological approach to studying real persons. The present work presents first steps into conceptualization of uniqueness of the individual – the human individuality – in a holistic picture embracing different levels of organization, leaving room for dynamic fluctuations in both the content and the behaviour for its realization. Introduced also are ideas on new ways of measuring individuality including new type of data gathering and scaling; study design including time as an integral part, aggregation of unique personal meanings by conceptual cluster analysis, data analysis done not on dimension-by-dimension but on person-by-person approach; and data processing based on differential equations.