ABSTRACT
During the 1970s a discussion about the crisis in social psychology in general and about small groups in particular took place. Small-group research has been segmented into different parts that do not notice each other. And, in each single part, small-group research no longer plays a dominant role, as there are many other interesting research areas. The beginning of the crisis in explaining social behavior in general and small groups in particular lay in the perception of other disciplines that were also engaged in research on small groups. Psychological small-group research, as the first discipline, is dominated by the experimental method and research of ad hoc groups. The unintegrated disciplinary matrices of small-group research look like a crisis created by external reasons in the sense of I. D. Steiner, but this crisis is based on internal scientific reasons and only capable of being resolved by a more complex approach.
