The Stream of Behavior

"The chapters of this book report the methods and results of some empirical studies of the stream of behavior; they tell of efforts to cope with the problems we have outlined, and of the successes and failures of these efforts. In one respect the studies tell the same story: they find the behavior stream to consist of discrete, qualitatively different, replicated behavior units. The picture of the behavior stream that emerges from these studies is not quite the confused and confusing, infinitely varying phenomenon it has sometimes been asserted to be. Six of the eleven investigations (Chapters 3, 4, 5, 6, 9 and 11) use as their primary data two or more of the eighteen day-long specimen records which are now available. These records are identified, and sources of further information about them, are given in Appendix 1.1. Two studies (Chapters 7 and 8) use behavior setting specimen records as their primary data. These records have been published (Barker, Wright, Barker & Schoggen, 1961) and two of them are reproduced in Appendix 1.2 where the following behavior units have been marked upon them for illustrative purposes: behavior episodes (as used in Chapters 8, 9 and 10); social contacts (as used in Chapter 5), environmental force units (as used in Chapters 3 and 4), and social actions (as used in Chapter 7). The studies provide, then, evidence of the usefulness of two kinds of primary data (specimen records and recordings of talk) and of a number of analytical approaches. The studies reveal the richness of these records of behavior for many problems and they demonstrate that they have the value of true scientific specimens." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).