Abstract

The present study investigated occurrence frequencies of daily terms which people use in explaining causes and reasons for behaviors in personal relationships. Furthermore, dimensions underlying those explanatory terms were analyzed. First, five hundred subjects were asked to describe explanatory terms of causes and reasons for 59 behavioral events that could be occurred frequently in a daily life. Content analysis on these free responses generated 132 explanatory terms and their frequencies differed across subject's sex, types, and phases of interpersonal relationships. Among those 70 terms were, then, selected with the criteria of the high frequency, independence in meaning, and representativeness for each category. Another group of 66 college students were asked to classify the 70 terms into 10 categories according to the similarity in the meaning. Custer analysis and multidimensional scaling (ALSCAL) on the similarity data consistently revealed three dimensions (stress=14%). The first dimension was interpreted as good-bad, the second dimension as pereon-stimulus or situations, and the third dimension as actor-relationships. Implications and suggestions for the subsequent research were discussed.