The Bronfenbrenner Primer

A Guide to Develecology

Lawrence Shelton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351470711
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This is the first ever introduction to Urie Bronfenbrenner's Ecological Systems Framework written specifically for undergraduate students. The author provides a carefully structured, guided introduction to Bronfenbrenner's concepts, their interpretation, and their potential applications. Bronfenbrenner's scientific analysis of the role the environment plays in human development earned him a premier place alongside Jean Piaget, Sigmund Freud, and Erik Erikson as a contributor to our understanding of developmental processes. His ideas are essential for analysing how development happens, how it goes astray, how to right it when it does, and how to create environments that will promote healthy development.

The Bronfenbrenner Primer walks students through each component of the framework in a logical order, helping students build a solid, systematic understanding. It describes the background and context that led Bronfenbrenner to develop his framework, illustrates a wide array of potential applications, and provides activities students can do to practice applying the framework to their own experience. Honed over 25 years of teaching Bronfenbrenner's ideas, this text will be essential reading for students across the behavioral and social sciences.

1

INTRODUCTION TO URIE BRONFENBRENNER

 

Who Was Urie Bronfenbrenner?

Urie Bronfenbrenner was a developmental psychologist. He earned a doctorate at the University of Michigan, and then taught for many years in the Department of Human Development at Cornell University. Bronfenbrenner wanted research on child development to be understood and to be useful. He especially wanted public policy to focus on supporting the development of children and families so that all children would have opportunity to grow up healthy and competent. He strongly advocated for Lyndon Johnson’s “war” against poverty, and helped to design and implement the Head Start program for children from low-income families.

As Bronfenbrenner’s career progressed, he became increasingly frustrated by the lack of child development research that could be used directly to understand how development was influenced by the neighborhood and community children lived in and how social policy affected the environments that shaped children’s development. As he argued vigorously for research that considered the environment as well as the development that happened within it, he came to understand that one reason researchers didn’t pay specific attention to the environment was that the developmental sciences didn’t actually have a way of conceptualizing the environment. Although professionals in the field talked about the importance of the environment, and referred to the ecology of children and families, there was no common language or conceptual framework for identifying the elements of the ecosystem or how it affected development or relationships.

Researchers often measured or gathered data on characteristics of people, such as social class, family income, education, race, or ethnicity, measures we refer to as demographic data. But these data don’t really reflect the environments people live in, what people do, where they spend their time, or who the important people in their lives are. Demographic measures don’t tell us how the environment treats people. Bronfenbrenner began to refer to the typical demographic variables as people’s “social addresses,” measures that tell us where people live in the social system. He wanted to see research that actually assessed what people experienced in the social system, what the characteristics of their specific environments were. From these, he hoped, we could learn how the environment acts in shaping development.

Bronfenbrenner came to ecology early. His understanding of the world was deeply affected in childhood, when, as he described in the Preface to his 1979 book, he had the good fortune to grow up on the grounds of a state institution for people with intellectual and psychiatric disabilities. There he roamed the fields and the woods with his father, a neuropathologist, trained in medicine. His father also had a Ph.D. in zoology, and Bronfenbrenner described him as a “field naturalist at heart” (1979, p. xi). He wrote: “Wherever we were he would alert my unobservant eyes to the workings of nature by pointing to the functional interdependence between living organisms and their surroundings” (1979, p. xii).

What Did Urie Bronfenbrenner Do?

Bronfenbrenner realized psychology did not have ecological concepts adequate for answering the kinds of questions he asked, questions that were necessary for understanding how society hindered development and how we might change it to support development. So he set out to create a way to conceptualize the human ecosystems in which development occurs. He set forth the framework in his 1979 book, The Ecology of Human Development. In the book, he outlined the concepts he distilled from decades of research and theory about what influences human development. He specified the concepts that were to be included (Definitions), offered a few assumptions that were important to make (Propositions), and presented a set of testable Hypotheses about how the ecosystem functions in shaping development. He created a scientific conceptualization, with as much specificity, objectivity, and clarity as possible. He encouraged researchers to test it, revise it, and expand on it, as these are the basic principles of any science. Bronfenbrenner continued to revise, test, and expand his understanding of development throughout his long career.

For his framework, Bronfenbrenner assumed a constructivist model of development, with the person an active participant in experience, and attempting to make sense of it. In the process of exploring and trying to adapt to the environment, the person constructs an understanding of the environment, and acquires skills to deal with it. Bronfenbrenner drew many ideas from Jean Piaget, particularly Piaget’s book The Construction of Reality in the Child (1954).

In trying to capture the essence of the ecosystem, Bronfenbrenner began with the work of Kurt Lewin, who had tackled the task decades earlier. Acknowledging his debt to Lewin, Bronfenbrenner wrote:

the conception of the environment as a set of regions each contained within the next draws heavily on the theories of Kurt Lewin (1931, 1935, 1938). Indeed, this work may be viewed as an attempt to provide psychological and sociological substance to Lewin’s brilliantly conceived topological territories.

(1979, p. 9; for more detail about Bronfenbrenner’s understanding of Lewin, see Bronfenbrenner’s 1977 article)

To these beginnings, Bronfenbrenner added concepts and connections drawn from a wide array of social science research to formulate his framework for putting development in context.

Why Is Bronfenbrenner’s Work Important to Me?

As an undergraduate at Harvard, I majored in a field called “Social Relations.” The title referred not to college party life, but to understanding human development and relationships within their social contexts. Social Relations was an interdisciplinary department incorporating developmental, social, and clinical psychologists, cultural anthropologists, sociologists, and psychiatrists. I studied Freud, Erikson, Piaget, Sullivan, Lewin, and Skinner, and was exposed to psychophysiology, psychopathology, psycholinguistics, anthropology, sociology, and more. My subsequent career and teaching have evolved from the integrative, multidisciplinary, and applied foundation that was laid down during those undergraduate years. I went on to study Child Psychology at the University of Minnesota. Studying child psychology research, I was often frustrated by two shortcomings in the professional literature. First, much of the research was not really developmental, because it studied age differences, not change over time. Cross-sectional studies can’t really identify the processes or course of development in the way that longitudinal studies can. Second, research often ignored the context of the subjects in the studies, the environments that children were in. I was greatly pleased to hear Bronfenbrenner express his own similar dissatisfactions with the field.

When I began to study and then to teach Bronfenbrenner’s framework, I found that it fit neatly onto the multidisciplinary foundation I began to develop in my major in Social Relations. His concepts provided me a language for describing professional as well as personal experiences I had had in a variety of programs and institutional settings. As a developmental psychologist myself, and a professor of Human Development and Family Studies, I was familiar with the problems in our fields he was responding to. Most importantly, his framework filled a gap in my understanding of development, the gap he had identified as the lack of a conceptual language to describe how people and our environments interact in the processes of development.

As I worked to help students understand this conceptual language, I gradually discovered how powerful and essential Bronfenbrenner’s concepts really are. Learning and being able to apply the framework can make a person’s understanding of the ecosystem and of development significantly more valid, differentiated, and useful. Bronfenbrenner provides a general, and generalizable, framework that can guide both individual attempts to facilitate development and analysis of policy and proposed social interventions. Bronfenbrenner’s approach applies to all development, optimal and less than optimal. It applies equally to children developing competence and adolescents becoming delinquents or addicts. Increasingly, I have found Bronfenbrenner’s work consistent with the central features of the theories that have survived best.

Bronfenbrenner’s views have become a major organizing scheme in my understanding of development and relationships. As I have evolved into an applied develecologist, his ideas have become essential in my teaching. As his ideas have become so important to my understanding of development, I have been increasingly puzzled by the relative inattention to Bronfenbrenner’s perspective in the texts available for use in courses in human development. His ideas are usually mentioned, sometimes accurately, but they rarely are used to organize the material in texts.

I think one reason scant attention has been paid to Bronfenbrenner’s work outside the research community is that his primary presentation of the framework, in his 1979 book The Ecology of Human Development, appeared now nearly four decades ago and was addressed to graduate students and researchers. The presentation of the perspective appearing there is tied to analyses of research studies that are now dated. As well, the terminology Bronfenbrenner uses is rich and precise, able to be understood and appreciated only with considerable study. So, while his views are recognized as important and provocative, and are mentioned in nearly every human development text, they are given cursory treatment, usually only in outline form. Typically, his views are presented as one of several viewpoints or approaches to understanding development, and then are not integrated with the material on development that follows. This treatment gives students the impression that Bronfenbrenner is as important and irrelevant as Freud and other outdated theorists mentioned in the introductory chapters, and thus worthy of being forever after ignored. This impression is misleading, of course, since the classic theories provide concepts that have gained wide acceptance in modern culture. The classic notions of old theories of development, behavior, and relationships form the historic underpinnings of the social sciences.

We cannot understand our current thinking if we can’t place it in its intellectual context. In my view, Bronfenbrenner’s ideas deserve close study and understanding because they incorporate concepts essential to our useful interpretation of human development. There has been no introduction to his views, nothing published that makes his perspective accessible to students. This primer is my attempt to fill that gap, to present the human developmental ecological approach of Bronfenbrenner in an accessible manner, to put this powerful tool in the hands of students and others who would understand development.

References

Bronfenbrenner, U. (1977). Lewinian space and ecological substance. Journal of Social Issues, 32, 513–531.

Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The Ecology of Human Development: Experiments by Nature and Design. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Lewin, K. (1931). Environmental forces in child behavior and development. In C. Murchison (Ed.), A Handbook of Child Psychology. Worcester, MA: Clark University Press.

Lewin, K. (1935). A Dynamic Theory of Personality. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Lewin, K. (1938). The Conceptual Representation and Measurement of Psychological Forces. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Piaget, J. (1954). The Construction of Reality in the Child. New York: Basic Books.

2

FROM ECOLOGY OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT TO DEVELECOLOGY

What we call a field of study is important. The label helps us identify what is to be studied and how. It also may set boundaries, limiting the topic or the methods.

In his writing, Bronfenbrenner used the phrase “the ecology of human development” to refer to his work. The focus was to be human development, and he wanted to examine the environment, or context, in which development occurs. He defined the field this way:

The ecology of human development involves the scientific study of the progressive, mutual accommodation throughout the life course, between an active, growing human being and the changing properties of the immediate settings in which the developing person lives, as this process is affected by relations between these settings, and by the larger contexts in which the settings are embedded.

(DEFINITION 1, Bronfenbrenner, 1989, p. 188)

This definition draws attention to crucial aspects of Bronfenbrenner’s views, assumptions, and intentions. First, he intends to forward a scientific, research-based framework in which the assumptions about reality, the principles, and the definitions of concepts are as clear and concise as possible. In a scientific framework, testable hypotheses can be derived, and appropriate research strategies described. Second, he views humans as active participants in the process of development, engaged in continuing adaptation to an environment, an environment that includes relationships with other persons. Third, the environment is assumed to be changing, rather than static, and to be adapting to the developing person, so the accommodations made by the person and the environment are mutual and reciprocal. Fourth, he conceives the environment as consisting of different settings, some of which the person participates in. Next, the process of mutual accommodation is affected by the relationships between settings, or parts of the environment. Finally, the process of mutual accommodation between person and settings is influenced by the larger context—community, society, and culture.

As Bronfenbrenner continued his work, his focus changed and his intent broadened. In his 1979 book, he hoped to convince researchers to put the environment into the study of human development, to pay attention to the context, and offered his framework to help them conceptualize the ecosystems in which development occurs. As his thinking progressed, he took on the broader task of explaining the complex role of the ecosystem in development, and began to describe his work as an “Ecological Systems Theory of Development.” As he moved more deeply into the processes of development, his attention turned to examining the role in development of biological change, and the difficult task of understanding the transactions of genetically driven changes with changes in the ecosystem. At this turn, he referred to his task as creating a “Bioecological Theory of Development,” which would recognize the equal partnership of nature and nurture, heredity and environment. As he expanded his work further to incorporate the importance of attending to the psychological and social processes involved in the development of the biologically changing person in a dynamic ecosystem, others were moved to use the “biopsychosocialecological model of development.” Bronfenbrenner headed off that proliferation of prefixes in his own work by referring to his understanding of development as a “Person-Process-Context Model.” This has the advantage of being easy to remember and encouraging attention to all three components. He later added “time” to his label to make it a “PPCT” model of development.

In this sequence of labels, we see Bronfenbrenner engaged in two tasks: defining a field—the ecology of human development—and naming the model of development he was constructing, as it went through a number of elaborations. At the heart of his work is the desire to meld ecology and development. In my view, he never quite succeeded in finding the right label for what he was trying to do. For his model, the term “bioecological” places biological aspects of development in a privileged position compared to psychological and interpersonal aspects, and thus fails to express the more encompassing integrative nature of our expanding understanding of human development. Are we to look only at biology and the ecosystem? The PPCT label for the model works well enough. For the field of study, “Ecology of Human Development” is useful, but suggests that human development might be studied without considering ecology. That is c...