ABSTRACT
First, a comment that is a response both to George’s chapter and more generally to all of the contributions in this volume. It seems a natural and useful evolution for a field of study to progress through cycles of research. The first cycle perhaps entails the throwing of a wide net to encompass a broad range of variables but within a certain conceptual perspective. The first cycle serves to both reveal more clearly the complexity of relationships and to rule out those hypotheses, relationships, and variables that appear to be unimportant to the phenomena being studied. The comprehensiveness of this cycle eventually yields a better “big picture” of the phenomena and a new perspective gradually emerges that changes the roles of different variables.
