ABSTRACT
Finding a combination of theoretical approaches in the area of small-group research seems to be a valuable strategy toward an integration of different theoretical concepts into a more powerful middle-range approach (Witte, 1990). The similarities and dissimilarities of leading theories give us an idea of how we might integrate theoretical concepts into such an approach. The ideal, of course, is a complex theory that explains behavior in small groups—one that might address first individual behavior and then the behavior of the group as a whole. Such attempts are rare in social psychology and would lie in the tradition of what is called “theoretical” in other disciplines, or those instances in which one concept is used as a combination of different theoretical approaches typically found in natural sciences. Such an intention must not be confused with meta-theoretical approaches, which speculate as to how theories might be constructed, or with theoretical generalizations, which are intended to explain different results using a single theory. Both such approaches are both necessary and praiseworthy, but the program to be followed here differs in its goal. The idea here is that valid theoretical concepts that are able to explain empirical results and that are accepted in the literature as well-supported notions are combined into a more complex theory. One further aim is to combine concepts that have a mathematical kernel or core as a means of achieving both qualitative and quantitative theoretical predictions of individual behavior in small groups. Predicting amounts is also an unusual, but most important way for theoretical construction, for Tukey (1969) chided psychologists with the admonition: “Amount, as well as direction is vital. The physical scientists have learned much by storing up amounts, not just directions” (p. 86). Further, according to Tukey:
Measuring the right things on a communicable scale let us stockpile information about amounts. Such information can be useful, whether or not the chosen scale is an interval scale. Before the second law of thermodynamics—and there were many decades of progress in physics and chemistry before it appeared—the scale of temperature was not, in any trivial sense, an interval scale.
(p. 80)