INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCE AND PARADOX IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF SMALL-GROUPS

This study attempts to understand individual emotional experience in t he context of group development. It emphasizes the first level of abst raction of group member experience rather than individual experience o ver time through second-order interpretations. Data were gathered from mixed groups of 21 students, over 9 weeks, in a group process course at a large state university. Students had no prior group process train ing and kept weekly journals for credit. Content analysis was performe d on the journals, meaning units were coded for theme, and frequencies of themes describing affective and traditional group process response s were tallied. The data clearly supported the paradoxical description s of group life, especially conflict, offered by Smith and Berg (1988) . The data may also represent what the move toward relativistic (Sinno tt, 1984) or dialectical (Kiegel, 1975, 1977) thinking may look like a t the individual level.