Who is Pulling the Strings?

Baumert and colleagues argued that research on between-and within-individual differences and expression of personality processes in context should be integrated. We applaud this effort and their focus on developmental processes but felt that their descriptions remained too unspecific. This comment highlights six issues that may contribute to a fruitful debate of future personality research: (a) induction time, (b) co-development of disorder states, (c) theory testing, (d) non-ergodicity and inferences at the within-individual level, (e) development as a complex dynamic system and (f) integration of literatures from neighboring scientific disciplines.