抄録
The present study examined implications of a new theoretical concept of group space which was applied to three environmental settings, i.e., school buildings, a playground of a kindergarten and University cafeteria. In this attempt, basic principles and theoretical concepts of a social ecological approach developed by Binder (1972) and Stokols' (1987) notion of group x place transaction were applied and elaborated to the study of educational space. The social ecological approach was formulated as a dynamic perspective on the transaction between physical settings and group dynamic processes with several analytic concepts. They include groups space, socio-petal, socio-fugal space, behavioral settings, public, semi-public, private space, and temporal organization of space. From three pilot studies it was revealed and suggested that 1) school buildings had differentiated and segmented multi-faceted group space depending on different subsets of social groups (class, grade and student body), 2) in a University cafeteria male and female groups exhibited different seat-taking behavior and rules for maintaining group-space and coordinated eating and socializing behavior within the group space, and 3) a playground in a kindergarten was composed of some thirty-eight behavior settings that provided different environmental affordance for the three age groups and contained particular set of activity patterns in the use of physical settings. The implications of a social ecological dimension in educational settings and in other living environment at large were explicated in terms of their functions in regulating group processes and users' transactions with the environment. A conceptual model dealing with hidden dimensions of space as ethnomethod was finally proposed.
