Research

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Compendium of Dimensions for PPA
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Annotated Bibliography of Research on Personal Projects
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Personal Project Pursuit: On Human Doings and Well-Beings
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Personal Projects: A Rationale and Method for Investigation
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Online Article:
Personal Projects and Free Traits: Lives, Liberties and the Happiness of Pursuit

My research explores how human flourishing depends on the sustainable pursuit of personal projects.

Personal projects are extended sets of personally salient action which can range from "taking out the garbage" to "taking out my political opponent." They can be onerous or easy, deeply private or joyously communal.

Personal projects may be the route through which we inadvertently discover happiness and they can also be the vehicle for our own self destruction.

My concern has been to create methodologies for assessing the content, appraisal, dynamics and impact of the projects of individuals and groups and to explore the theoretical implications for human emotional and physical well-being.

The research program lies at the intersection of personality and life-span developmental psychology, and it has increasingly forged linkages to other fields ranging from moral philosophy to occupational therapy.

My Fellowship activities will involve four different projects. The first is the completion of a book on personal projects as a perspective on human personality. This will involve both library research and continuing statistical analysis of my archive of data on people's personal projects gathered over a twenty year period.

The second project involves further analysis and exploration of a five year longitudinal study of "women, work and well-being," focusing on how the personal projects and selves to which individuals are committed impact on their well-being during the transition to retirement. I am particularly interested in the crucial role of voluntary activity envisaged by these women and on the factors that facilitate the enhancement of social capital and community engagement.

The third project will involve exploration of the extraordinary holdings of the Murray Center to examine one aspect of the personal projects perspective: what I call "free trait theory." Essentially the argument is that much of our everyday behavior involves "acting out of character," for example highly agreeable individuals having to be "tough" in an oppressive environment, or introverted teachers acting as "pseudo-extraverts" in order to advance the core project of "getting my students excited."

I have argued that such seemingly disingenuous behavior may exact emotional and physical costs, but that these may be mitigated by the availability of "restorative niches" in which individuals can regain their "first natures."

I want to explore the Murray archives to see if we might operationalize some of the key component of the free trait model. For example, I wish to explore discrepancies between self rated and other rated personality traits, ratings on depression scales and indices of well-being and narrative accounts of possible restorative niches.

The final project is to explore with some abandon, recent, still rather inchoate aspects of our approach to human personality.

I wish to write on the rich mutual relevance of our work with the scholarship of those exploring similar themes in moral philosophy and legal theory. I wish also to explore our new methodological tool of "idio-tapes" (in which we ask individuals to provide us with images of their personal contexts and lives by running us through an idiosyncratic, imaginative "videotape" of their most important scenes (past, present and future). The idio-tape images have proven to be extraordinarily evocative and I would like to explore their implications both for personality and clinical assessment.