Contextualizing Personality Development Requires a Persons-In-Contexts Framework: A comment on Klimstra and McLean (2024)

Klimstra and McLean argue that personality psychologists should reevaluate the labels they ascribe to the phenomena they study with an emphasis on personality development. However, the authors offer little guidance on how the field should address these concerns. We argue that contextualizing personality development requires researchers study persons in contexts. This framework offers opportunities to understand how the person and the sociocultural context they are embedded in work together (versus separately) to influence development. We extend the authors’ call by suggesting ways researchers can use this framework by broadening the scope of experiences studied and mixed-methods approaches.