I really liked reading Lewin and thinking about the three areas of interest in psychology, life space, the processes in the physical/social world that do not affect the life space, and the boundary zone of the life space. When thinkning about my research interests particular adolescent development and their ecological environment I felt like it fit into both the life space and the boundary zone. For instance, my work with Anastasia Snyder focuses on youth expectations and parent expectations and educational attainment. I feel like this deals with the life space, the current motivations and desires of the youth at a given time and assessing those. Then going ahead and looking at their current educational attainment at a given time. To me parental expectations fall in the boundary zone of the adolescent's life space since they are not measured as youth's perceptions of their parent's expectations but given by the parent's themselves.
The discussion of food's existence and the knowledge of food's existence and how only the knowledge of the food's existence being must be represented in the individual's life space was interesting to me and made sense in that it is only one's knowledge of the food's presence or lack there of that can be represented in the life space as this knowledge then affects one's behavior. In my ideas about parental expectations for youth it is only the youth's knowledge or perception of their parents expectations or the lack of parental expectations that affects the youth's behavior and thus should be represented in their life space.
Perhaps I am unsure of Lewin's point here regarding understanding how the past may affect the situation at a given time. Is it only an individual's perceptions of the past and their future (their realtiy and wish levels of the past as well as their hope and planning for the future) that can be included in the present situation or the field at a given time?
That was my understanding of it. Did anyone else agree or have a different understanding? Let me know.
I really enjoyed this reading too. Your example about parental expectation was really interesting as well. In Cynthia's research, we also collected data in terms of parental expectation on educational attainment for preschool children. However, I've never thought that we missed the part of youth's perception of parental expectation! We just looked at parents' perception. However, youth's perception should affect youth's life as subjective probability.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I agree that youth would have perceptions based on their subjective feelings and experiences in the past. However, the connection among the past, a given time and the future was unclear part for me too.