During the past 20 years, behavioral and social scientists
following advances in physics and mathematics have shown an
increasing interest in complex, adaptive, self-organizing, dynamic
systems. The appeal of this perspective is fueled by the fact that
there are a handful of properties that are common to all dynamic
systems that can be used to explain the spontaneous emergence of
novel forms, the mechanisms of continuity and change, and the
dynamics of a large number of interacting factors. From animal
population dynamics to human neural processes, there is growing
evidence that human individual and social interactions may be
understood as a dynamic system. In the field of psychology, there
was a flurry of books during the early 1990s that explored the
dynamic human system. These titles, and those that have been
published since, fall into two general categories: those that
integrate dynamic systems ideas into psychological theories and
those that provide methods of modeling dynamic human systems (see
list of competitive titles below).
Despite the enrichment that dynamic systems principles have
afforded psychological theories, the methods provided to test these
theoretical assumptions have not been readily adopted. The reason
is that, unlike the physical scientists, social scientists are not
as familiar with the mathematical formulations (i.e., differential
and difference equations) required for these methods, nor are their
data particularly amenable to such manipulations or models.
Furthermore, the psychological relevance of some of the parameters
extracted from these methods (i.e., Lyupanov exponents, chaotic
attractors) is very difficult to interpret. What is needed is a
methodological middle road to bridge theory and analysis. The
proposed book on the state space grid method is perfectly poised to
provide that bridge.
State space grids were first developed by Marc Lewis and
colleagues (Lewis, Lamey, and Douglas, 1999) to depict sequences of
infant attention and distress. This technique has since been
applied to the study of parent-child interactions (Granic &
Lamey, 2002; Granic, Hollenstein, Dishion, & Patterson, 2003;
Hollenstein, Granic, Stoolmiller, & Snyder, 2005; Hollenstein
& Lewis, under review; Lewis, Zimmerman, Hollenstein, &
Lamey, 2004), and peer interactions (Dishion, Nelson, Bullock,
& Winter, 2005; Martin, Fabes, Hanish, & Hollenstein,
2005). At this time, there are projects in progress that extend
this work into the study of marital interactions, young adult group
drinking patterns, eye gaze and eye contact in response to
questioning, diary studies, and peer pressure dynamics.
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