A fieldwide framework is an outline employed by an academic field to present the work it conducts and the findings it has made.
The Systems Framework for Personality Psychology
The Systems Framework for Personality Psychology is a new fieldwide framework for personality psychology. It helps keep all the information about personality organized on this site. This framework is designed to present the personality system in a powerful new way that more clearly communicates the goals, pursuits, findings, and significance of the discipline of personality psychology.
The Systems Framework divides the discipline into four areas of study:
- Identifying the personality system
- Understanding the parts of personality
- How personality is organized, and
- How personality develops
Other Frameworks
There exist other approaches to organizing the discipline of personality psychology. Today, for example, the dominant framework is a "theoretical perspectives" framework. This framework organizes the discipline according to the major theoretical perspectives employed in the field.
For example:
- The psychodynamic perspective
- The biological perspective
- The social cognitive perspective
- The trait perspective
- The humanist perspective
-- and the findings from each area. The exact list may change a bit from occasion to occasion, but that represents the general idea. If you examine the table of contents of many textbooks in the field of personality psychology, for example, you will see something like this organization. The same applies -- although less consistently -- to certain research reviews in the field.