Lucien T. Winegar
Randolph-Macon College

Jaan Valsiner
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

In each of the chapters of these two volumes the contributors have posed
questions about the highly complex issue of development within social con-
text. Authors have chosen a particular aspect of this issue and in their chap-
ters have attempted to provide some answers about the specific topic they
have selected. Thus, the present two volumes on issues linking context and
development constitute a kind of a microgenetic experiment in the construc-
tion of ideas by all the participants whose contributions are included. Each
of the participants approached the complicated issue of development within
social context differently, starting from their varied empirical or theoretical
backgrounds, and moving toward their (not always very explicit) theoretical
goals. In this respect, the contributions to these two volumes constitute a
resource of empirical data for theoretical reasoning in psychology. We call
these data "metadata"--to emphasize the legitimacy of the study of reason-
ing processes of psychologists who write about context and development.

In this concluding chapter, we start with the assumption that the chapters
in these volumes are at least as valuable for the questions they raise collec-
tively as they are for the answers they provide individually. Taken together,
these chapters raise the question of how the questions we ask as develop-
mental scientists are related to our choices of metatheory, theory, method,
and phenomenon. In this chapter we focus on this "metaquestion" we see
emerging from these volumes. Here we both analyze some particular nuances
of questions about context/development relationships and suggest some pos-
sible ways of overcoming what we see as an existing stalemate in context-

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