“Tell me about your work. How do you get along with your bosses, co -
workers, subordinates?” Or, “Describe your relationship with your wife
and children.”
In some respects, we would expect the two methods to yield com -
parable results. After all, if an individual is really dominant, it should
show up in the way he or she deals with friends, coworkers, and family .On the other hand, there are also respects in which important differ -
ences may emerge. Questionnaire results are standardized and uniform,
independent of the content of the individual’s life. Interview results arepermeated by the details of an individual’s life: the politics at the office,the specific problems of raising a teenage daughter or of living in a de -
clining neighborhood. Case studies with all these details seem to pro -
vide a much better feel for the individual’s personality than do raw test
scores. But what they in fact give is a better feel for the individual’s life
structure , which may or may not be an accurate guide to personality .
One’s life structure is determined by countless forces beyond one’s con-trol: economic realities, accidents and illnesses, the help or interferenceof relatives. These are important elements in understanding the individ-ual’s world, but they are a source of potential confusion when one is try-ing to understand the individual.
INTERVIEW-BASED THEORIES OF ADULT DEVELOPMENT
At least one of the major theorists we will discuss, Daniel Levinson, ac -
knowledges this important difference. He says explicitly that by adult
development he means the “evolution of the life structure”—althoughhe believes that there is an inner, psychological side to that process thatseems akin to personality development. We believe this distinction iscrucial to an understanding of the field: Nothing we have said about thestability of personality should be interpreted to mean that the life struc -
ture does not evolve, and the theories of adult developmentalists need
not contradict our position on enduring dispositions. Agreement inprinciple, however, is not necessarily agreement in practice, and it willbe necessary to look at each case closely to see what portion we are will -
ing to believe. We return to the relation between personality traits and
the life structure in Chapter 10 when we offer a theoretical frameworkfor the Five-Factor Model.The Personal Interview 169