Abstract
An approach is developed that relies on the principle that an individual's personality is best described and understood in terms of various contexts in which that individual is embedded. Five different kinds of contexts are considered: historical, cultural (and subcultural), developmental, organizational, and interpersonal. Each is illustrated with findings from two national sample surveys (one done in 1957; the other in 1976) that measured social motives through thematic apperceptive techniques. This contextual approach implies that personality is dynamically accumulative over the life span and that it is best assessed by subdividing a given personality characteristic into variants of that characteristic, which, if measured, can accurately pick up the contextual effects on the characteristic.
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