ABSTRACT
THEORETICAL WRITINGS in the social sciences call for a more refined, temporally based, view of social relationships. One representative of this "temporal initiative" is the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of personal relationships (PR). This chapter has four objectives: (a) to review temporal issues across different areas of the social sciences; (b) to identify biases in scientific thinking that predispose us to ignore or minimize the importance of time; ( c) to develop a model that views PRs in three temporal contexts: interactional-sequential, exchange-situational, and phasic-transitional; and ( d) to use this model to interpret a set of studies in terms of temporal contextualization and temporal extension. In chapter 8, several theories of personal relationships are examined for their temporal features. This next chapter has two main objectives: to use the tripartite contextual model to review existing theories that contribute to our understanding of temporal structure in
Bacbground and Oueruiew
7 • PERSONAL RELATIONSHIP RESEARCH 2 1 1
chapter introduces a descriptive model that considers relationships across different temporal contexts. This model also integrates models discussed in previous chapters. Using this contextual model, a temporal scale is developed that classifies research according to degree of temporal contextualization, that is, how much the research presents relationships as dynamic and changing. This chapter concludes with a subjective, but systematic, review of exemplary personal relationship research according to this new scale. Chapter 8 reviews several (although not all) theories within the field of personal relationships and interprets them within the language of the contextual model. On the basis of this review, a temporal grammar for relationships is outlined. Box 7 . 1 (next page) provides an outline and map to help you through the key aspects of this chapter.
