A road careened into the woods: Comments on Dr. Morrison's commentary

Morrison's commentary on the paper entitled “Social Competence as a Developmental Construct” E. Waters & L. A. Sroufe Developmental Review 1983 3 79–97 focused primarily on the relevance of grand theory to contemporary issues in developmental psychology. The present comments reiterate central themes in the Waters and Sroufe paper that were either misconstrued or not discussed in the commentary. Waters and Sroufe offered (1) a definitional sketch rather than a grand theory, (2) a discussion of the need to employ diverse measures in order to assess a single construct at different ages, (3) much more extensive reference to empirical evidence than indicated in the commentary, and (4) a detailed discussion of assessment strategies common to various projects in which the coherence of individual development has been most evident in empirical data.