A fieldwide framework is an outline employed by an academic field to present the work it conducts and the findings it has made (e.g., Mayer, 1998; 2005).
In the discipline of personality psychology, for example, one commonly-used framework today is a "theoretical perspectives" framework. This framework organizes the discipline according to the major theoretical perspectives employed in the field.
For example:
- The psychodynamic perspective
- The biological perspective
- The social cognitive perspective
- The trait perspective
- The humanist perspective
-- and the findings from each area. The exact list may change a bit from occasion to occasion, but that represents the general idea. If you examine the table of contents of many textbooks in the field of personality psychology, for example, you will see something like this organization. The same applies -- although less consistnetly -- to certain research reviews in the field.
References
Mayer, J. D. (1998). A systems framework for the field of personality. Psychological Inquiry, 14, 277-283.
Mayer, J. D. (2005). A tale of two visions: Can a new view of personality help integrate psychology? American Psychologist, 60, 294-307.
