Showing papers by "Barbara B. Brown published in 1992"

Disruptions in Place Attachment

Abstract: A study of disruptions in psychological processes can provide unique insight into their predisruption functioning as well as the disruptions themselves and their consequences. Place attachment processes normally reflect the behavioral, cognitive, and emotional embeddedness individuals experience in their sociophysical environments. An examination of disruptions in place attachments demonstrate how fundamental they are to the experience and meaning of everyday life. After the development of secure place attachments, the loss of normal attachments creates a stressful period of disruption followed by a postdisruption phase of coping with lost attachments and creating new ones. These three phases of the disruption process are examined with respect to disruptions due to burglaries, voluntary relocations, and disasters, with special attention to the Buffalo Creek, West Virginia, flood and the Yungay, Peru, landslide. Underlying the diversity of disruptions, dialectic themes of stability-change and individuality-communality provide a coherent framework for understanding the temporal phases of attachment and its disruption.

A Transactional Approach to Interpersonal Relations: Physical Environment, Social Context and Temporal Qualities

Abstract: This article overviews a program of research that has explored the implications of a transactional worldview for research on personal relationships. In particular, the present article emphasizes the role of the physical environment in relationships. It briefly describes our theoretical perspective and delineates the methods by which we study personal relationships. The main body of the article focuses on three kinds of relationship (acquaintance, family, neighbors), emphasizing the significance of the physical and social environments for individual and relational viability.

Close Relationships in their Physical and Social Contexts: A Transactional Perspective

Abstract: This article calls for more research that embeds dyadic relationships in their physical, social and temporal contexts. We use ethnographic accounts of courtship, wedding and placemaking practices in two different societies and find that: (1) social and environmental rituals often make salient the couple members' relationship to one another and their degree of obligation to their families and society; (2) events almost always involve significant use of the physical environment in terms of the location of events, the exchange of gifts, the use of special clothing and objects, etc.; and (3) activities occurring during these stages often symbolize and forecast future relationships between dyad members and between the dyad and its family and kin. Although network researchers often take into account the dyad's social context, our analysis suggests that physical and temporal qualities are also important.