Our approach to the study of Telic phenomena incorporates certain features which distinguish our work from that of most other investigators and theorists in this field.
The most distinctive features of our approach are as follows:
- We combine a systematic, structured and quantitative approach to the elicitation and analysis of Telic data (for example, a person’s account of his or her aspirations, attainments, problems and threats) with a more open, flexible and qualitative appreciation of the importance of the social, institutional, political and cultural contexts in which the elicitation and analysis takes place.
- We assume that neither structured questionnaires, nor ‘free form’ exploratory interview techniques, are reliable methods, on their own, for eliciting Telic data; instead, we use the responses to our questionnaires as a means of guiding and focusing the interview process; likewise, we use the interview transcripts to check, qualify and validate the data obtained via the questionnaires.
- While recognising that the Telic data elicited from a person often delineates salient and central features of his or her life situation and trajectory, we never assume that this information provides the ‘full story’. While we believe that it is inappropriate to ignore or dismiss the Telic (purposive) aspects of any personal narrative, we also believe that it is equally inappropriate to take these aspects, which constitute the individual’s rationalised account of his or her purposes, at face value.
- Unlike many contemporary ‘goal theories’, we focus upon the origin, creation, adoption, formulation and eventual dissipation and abandonment of goals, rather than upon their role as fully formed and active motivational components. Our interests centre upon questions about where a person’s goals come from, and why a person may discard goals, either before or after they have been achieved. We study how goals may be ‘firmed up’ from their vague, woolly and aspirational beginnings, and how they become more clearly defined and operationalised prior to implementation. We observe how they may subsequently lose both definition and relevance, becoming sidelined and de-activated, or abandoned. We hold such questions to be as interesting as those concerned with how fully formed goals are implemented, or how action plans and strategies are executed.
- Our work extends the scope of previous goal-oriented approaches, by using a more elaborate conceptual framework that accounts for the complexity of the Telic phenomena revealed by our investigations. For example, we have come to be concerned as much with Telic repellers (fears, threats and problems) as with Telic attractors (aspirations, desires, goals, attainments and achievements). The categories in our conceptual framework are thus symmetrical in relation to the ‘desirability’ dimension, and we emphasise the motivational role of unattractive outcomes (whether anticipated or actualised) as much as that of attractive outcomes.
- Our work overturns the implicitly static paradigm embodied in many ‘goal theories’ - which often seem to imply that goals are the fixed and permanent destinations and milestones for purposive behaviour and experience - by emphasising the essential fluidity of Telic structures. We emphasise the variability of salience (meaning relevance or importance) as a principal characteristic of all components of those structures. We never assume that any particular Telic attractor or repeller will retain its salience or relevance as a destination or milestone in the essentially fluid and continually evolving chart of the person’s Telic terrain.
- In these, and in other ways, our approach offers a significantly more integrated, coherent and comprehensive framework for the analysis of the structure and dynamics of purposive experience and behaviour.
