Coping and Adapting to the High School Environment

The research that is described in this paper is based upon the writer's thesis that knowledge of how persons cope with their immediate social environment requires simultaneous knowledge of the behavior of persons and social settings. The thesis also affirms that how persons and social settings function and affect each other should derive from a point of view that persons and settings are interrelated. Concepts and methods employed to assess the person should also relate to the life of social settings. Concepts employed to understand a specific social environment should specify how these concepts affect individuals. For the present writer, analogies from biological ecology provide the context for responding to these questions. An important ecological axiom is that varied environments produce different personal adaptations. This axiom has received substantial verification from ecological studies in biology