Social contexts, coping and well-being: what we know and what we need to know

Many psychologists share a fundamental focus: to understand the interplay between social contexts, coping, and well-being. To highlight recent progress in this area, I offer a guiding conceptual framework and discuss eight propositions reviewing out some aspects of what we know about environment and coping. The propositions consider such issues as the underlying patterns of social climate and their links to personal development and dysfunction, the idea that appraisal and coping skills transmit and alter the influence of life contexts on psychosocial functioning and maturation, the connections between ongoing life circumstances and participation in and the outcomes of intervention programs, and the role of personal characteristics in matching individuals and environments. I then focus on eight enigmas or what we need to know, such as how to conceptualize social contexts as dynamic systems with a developmental history, how to identify the underlying sources of individual differences in responsiveness and resistance to social influences, how to balance the risks and rewards of powerful environments, how to understand the link between adversity and personal growth, how to examine the generality of models across ethnic and cultural groups, how to encompass the ongoing interplay between biogenetic and psychosocial determinants of adaptation, and how to enhance positive carryover from intervention programs to ongoing life contexts. I close by addressing some implications of these issues for a dynamic context-sensitive psychology.