Social Structure and Personality

Social structure and personality (SSP) research is concerned with the relationship between macro-social systems or processes and individual feelings, attitudes, and behaviors. It is considered a perspective or framework rather than a theoretical paradigm because it is not associated with general theoretical claims that transcend specific substantive problems. Rather, it provides a set of orienting principles that can be applied across diverse substantive areas. These principles direct our attention to the hierarchically organized processes through which macrostructures come to have relevance for the inner lives of individual persons and, in theory, the processes through which individual persons come to alter social systems. Although the SSP name implies an exclusive focus on social structures, SSP research is concerned more broadly with social systems, sets of "persons and social positions or roles that possess both a culture and a social structure" (House, 1981, p. 542). Whereas House (1981) notes that social structure can be used to refer to "any or all aspects of social systems," he and other SSP researchers define social structure more precisely as "a persisting and bounded pattern of social relationships (or pattern of behavioral intention) among the units (persons or positions) in a social system" (House, 1981, p. 542, emphasis in the original). This definition encompasses features of the macro-social order such as the structure of the labor market and systems of social stratification as well as processes such as industrialization. In contrast, culture is used in SSP research to refer to "a set of cognitive and evaluative beliefs— beliefs about what is or what ought to be—that are shared by the members of a social system and transmitted to new members" (House, 1981, p. 542). The distinction between structure and culture is not always maintained in practice (a point we discuss in more detail later), but