An understanding of everyday lived experience, as well as of the culture that underlies it, shapes it, and is simultaneously shaped by it, is important for the study of human development. Traditional psychological methods, such as observation or experimentation in controlled laboratory and laboratory–like settings, or the use of questionnaires and surveys, have yielded data regarding how people perform in certain circumstances, what they say they do, and how they respond to questions. But a growing number of contemporary psychologists, responding to challenges to the relevance and ecological validity of these methods and seeking a fresh approach to the understanding of human development, have begun to expand their theoretical and methodological repertoire. Scholars are more commonly focusing on studying children and adults in the settings in which they are typically situated — at home, in the classroom, or in the workplace — treating the context in which development is occurring as necessarily integrated with that development (see, e.g., Corsaro, 1985; Dunn, 1988; Heath, 1983; Lave, 1988; Rogoff, 1990; Valsiner, 1987).

In doing so, these scholars are drawing on models and methods that have been used in other disciplines, notably cultural anthropology and some of the more qualitative approaches in sociology. The ideas incorporated in these methods are not new to psychology, however, but are to be found in the work of several early–twentiethcentury theorists, including Janet, Baldwin, Vygotsky, Werner, Dewey, and Mead (Cairns, 1992; Glick, 1992; Tudge, Putnam, & Valsiner, in press; van der Veer & Valsiner, 1988).