Boekaerts / Pintrich / Zeidner Handbook of Self-Regulation

1. Auflage 2005
ISBN: 978-0-08-057549-0
Verlag: Elsevier Science & Techn.
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 816 Seiten

The Handbook of Self-Regulation represents state-of-the-art coverage of the latest theory, research, and developments in applications of self-regulation research. Chapters are of interest to psychologists interested in the development and operation of self-regulation as well as applications to health, organizational, clinical, and educational psychology.This book pulls together theory, research, and applications in the self-regulation domain and provides broad coverage of conceptual, methodological, and treatment issues. In view of the burgeoning interest and massive research on various aspects of self-regulation, the time seems ripe for this Handbook, aimed at reflecting the current state of the field. The goal is to provide researchers, students, and clinicians in the field with substantial state-of-the-art overviews, reviews, and reflections on the conceptual and methodological issues and complexities particular to self-regulation research. - Coverage of state-of-the-art in self-regulation research from different perspectives - Application of self-regulation research to health, clinical, organizational, and educational psychology - Brings together in one volume research on self-regulation in different subdisciplines - Most comprehensive and penetrating compendium of information on self-regulation from multi-disciplinary perspectives

Autoren/Hrsg.

Boekaerts, Monique

Pintrich, Paul R

Zeidner, Moshe

Leseproben

1 Self-Regulation
An Introductory Overview
Monique Boekaerts*; Paul R. Pintrich†; Moshe Zeidner‡    *Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands
†The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan
‡The University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel In planning the Handbook of Self-Regulation, our aim was to provide an overview of a relatively new and increasingly important area in psychological research: self-regulation. Although self-regulation is a relative newcomer in the psychology journals, there is now a large but diverse body of research on this topic. In the 1980s, a large number of articles on self-regulation appeared, mainly in social psychology and personality journals. In the 1990s, the concept was broadened to include various aspects and application of self-regulation constructs, including self-regulated learning, self-control, and self-management. Publications began to appear in educational, organizational, clinical, and health psychology journals that used a number of related but different self-regulation constructs and labels. Each of us was struck by the many different viewpoints on self-regulation that had been presented in the literature and by the broad range of phenomena that had been addressed by researchers involved in self-regulation research. We noticed that scholars from different areas of psychology had written about parallel but nonoverlapping phenomena and regretted that these articles were scattered throughout the many different psychological journals that reflected their own parochial interests and concerns. We felt that what was needed was a dialogue between researchers from these different fields within psychology. In our view, our understanding of the dynamics of self-regulation would profit a great deal from cross-area fertilization. A handbook offers the opportunity for scholars from the different areas to discuss their perspective on self-regulation, but to have these different viewpoints represented in one volume. In this respect we wanted to echo Bruner’s (1990) plea for less fragmentation and more coherence in psychological theory and research: I have written it (his book) at a time when psychology, the science of the mind as William James once called it, has become fragmented as never before in its history. It has lost its center and risks losing the cohesion needed to assume the internal exchange that might justify a division of labor between its parts. And the parts, each with its own organizational identity, its own theoretical apparatus, and often its own journals, have become specialties whose products become less and less exportable. Too often they seal themselves within their own rhetoric and within their own parish of authorities. This self-sealing risks making each part (and the aggregate that increasingly constitutes psychology’s patchquilt whole) ever more remote from other inquiries dedicated to the understanding of mind and the human condition—inquiries in the humanities or the other social sciences. (pp. ix–x) This quote can certainly be applied to research on self-regulation as it has been pursued by individuals working within the many different areas of psychology with a diversity of theories, models, constructs, and methodologies. Self-regulation theory and research in its many guises certainly deals with issues of the science of the mind. In fact, many of the specific issues William James was concerned with, such as willpower and behavior (e.g., his classic example of the difficulty of arising from a warm bed in the morning), are directly related to current topics in self-regulation. However, the search for a general understanding of self-regulation has not been coherent given the diversity in the field. For example, researchers in one area, such as educational psychology, may not read articles on self-regulation produced by researchers working in a different area, such as health psychology. The main reason for this alienation may be that applied psychologists working within a particular context consider themselves a specific scientific community: They speak the same language, use their own conceptual models, and construct their own instruments and research designs to collect data about a specific aspect of self-regulation (e.g., about self-regulated learning, managing stress, regulation of one’s health) in a specific context (e.g., homes, classrooms, health clinics, work-places). This has resulted in large bodies of domain-specific knowledge about self-regulation, each covering specific aspects of self-regulation and using their own scientific terminology. A consequence of such domain or area specificity is that the information assembled about self-regulation is published in separate journals. Even more detrimental to the development of a common insight into the various phenomena of self-regulation is that a kaleidoscope of terms and labels exists and that these may sound unfamiliar, even alien, to researchers who are not in that particular area. In our opinion, models and data collected from different vantage points with respect to the same or similar constructs are highly relevant to our efforts to achieve a science of the mind and a true understanding of what a complex construct such as self-regulation really means. These models and data can be the starting point for scholarly discussions which will promote reflection on one’s own ideas and further one’s understanding of the phenomena involving self-regulation. However, we are well aware that discussion and interaction of researchers who have drifted apart over the last few decades will be successful only if researchers have an open mind and are willing to question their own constructs and measurement instruments and are willing to extend and elaborate their own models. Given this diversity, but armed with the goal of helping to reduce fragmentation and increase coherence in the field, we sought to bring together authors with different perspectives on self-regulation. To achieve this goal, we invited authors with an active program of research in a particular area of self-regulation to write a chapter for this handbook. We also wanted to include authors from outside the United States of America to avoid the traditional bias of much of American psychology, as well as to represent the diversity of international research on this topic. We explained to our authors that a book with a diversity of vantage points on self-regulation would help to identify cross-cutting themes that unite researchers in the different areas of psychology. We encouraged them to write a chapter that would allow for exploration of the similarities and dissimilarities in the conceptual frameworks, paradigms, and research methodologies of various research groups and to stimulate cross-fertilization of ideas in the field. We asked our authors to focus on the different ways individuals guide and direct their own behavior, cognition, and affect as well as the interactions among cognition, affect, and action. To our delight most of the authors we invited agreed to write a chapter, and we think they were successful in discussing and integrating these different aspects in their chapters. In addition, we organized an expert meeting at Leiden University in The Netherlands. This expert meeting was sponsored by the Dutch National Foundation of Scientific Research (NWO) and we are very grateful for their support. For seven days, researchers from three applied fields of psychology met in Leiden to present their views on self-regulation and discuss the implications of their views, as well as to comment on the data and views presented by others. Many interesting questions were raised, the most prominent being whether the concepts used in health psychology, educational psychology, and organizational psychology represent similar ideas or whether quite different meanings are attached to these concepts in these different applied fields. Several chapters presented in this handbook grew out of these presentations and discussions. The choice of the other topics for inclusion in the handbook was guided by our wish to include a wide range of contributors who together would enhance the breadth of paradigmatic perspectives relevant to self-regulation. We have not strived for genuine comprehensiveness: It is clearly impossible to cover the entire range of topics that constitute the phenomenon of self-regulation and do justice to each aspect. Consequently, some topics were left out of the book. For example, activity psychology and the vast domain of mood regulation are clearly missing. The range of topics that are included cover the use of self-regulation constructs in various areas of psychology, such as social, personality, clinical, developmental, educational, organizational, health, and community psychology. It is clear from the diversity of the chapters in this handbook that self-regulation is a very difficult construct to define theoretically as well as to operationalize empirically. Nevertheless, the several years we worked together on the handbook have strengthened our conviction that self-regulation is an important topic that is highly relevant to the science of the mind and human behavior. At the same time, we are convinced that significant future progress is going to depend on our ability to clearly define the construct theoretically and to empirically distinguish it from other similar constructs. In this handbook many different definitions of self-regulation have been provided and a variety of explanations have been advanced to account for the...