ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of the book. This book describes both the process and outcome of research projects addressing self, motivation, and virtue. It provides a thorough review of the concepts of self, personality, identity, motivation, virtue, and well-being, with an eye to showing the superiority of the personality to the self framework as an approach to understanding virtue. The projects involved interdisciplinary team members, scholars from both social sciences and the humanities. In their designs, the teams worked to innovate not only theoretically but methodologically. The book explores a window on the experiences of another group—conservative Christians who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex and their allies. It offers the broadest perspective that researchers took on topics pertaining to self, motivation, and virtue. The book proposes the interdisciplinary underpinnings and challenges their project faced, and discusses issues of how to approach data collection and interpretation.
