Definition
Ecological systems theory sees a human being not as an isolated individual but as a being who constantly interacts with and changes together with the environment. To understand a child's behavior, we must look not only at the child's personality but also at the family, school, parents' workplaces, community, social institutions and culture, and even the historical period in which the child lives.
Bronfenbrenner criticized conventional developmental psychology for studying only the brief behavior of children with strange adults in strange laboratory settings, and he emphasized research on development in real-life contexts. This perspective became a core theory in social work courses such as human behavior and the social environment, child welfare, family welfare and social work practice.
Key Concepts
Interaction between the developing person and the environment
The individual is not merely influenced one-sidedly by the environment but actively acts on and reshapes it. Bidirectionality is central: a child's temperament influences the parents' parenting style, and that parenting style in turn influences the child.
Ecological transitions
Events that change a person's role or environment, such as starting school, graduating, moving, the birth of a sibling or retirement, are called ecological transitions and were regarded as important occasions for development.
Proximal processes and the bioecological model
In his later work, Bronfenbrenner regarded proximal processes, interactions between a person and the people and objects around them that recur regularly over extended periods, as the primary engines of development. He then extended the theory into the PPCT model, which considers Process, Person, Context and Time together, known as the bioecological model (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006).
Stages and Components
| System | Definition | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Microsystem | The closest environment, in which the person participates directly and interacts face to face | Family, school or daycare, peer group, neighbors |
| Mesosystem | The relationships and connections among the microsystems the person belongs to | Parent–teacher relationships, links between home and peer group |
| Exosystem | Settings in which the person does not participate directly but which affect the person | Parents' workplaces, a sibling's school, local government policy, mass media |
| Macrosystem | A society's culture, values, ideologies, laws and institutions that affect all the lower systems | Views of childhood, gender role norms, welfare systems, economic system |
| Chronosystem | Changes in the person and the environment over time | Timing of parents' divorce, historical events, life transitions |
The systems are usually drawn as concentric circles centered on the individual. Because the chronosystem was fully introduced in a 1986 paper, textbooks present the theory as having either “four systems” or “five systems.”
Theorists and Background
Bronfenbrenner (1917–2005) was born in Russia and moved to the United States at the age of six, and he spent many years researching human development and family studies at Cornell University. Keen to link research to policy, he is known for helping to found Head Start, the U.S. program for low-income children, in 1965. He also conducted comparative research on child rearing in the United States and the Soviet Union, emphasizing the influence of the macrosystem.
In social work, his theory combined with Germain and Gitterman's (1980) life model to provide theoretical support for the person-in-environment perspective. The ecomap, devised by Hartman (1978), is a representative tool for assessing the relationships between a client and environmental systems in diagram form. Because it emphasizes sociocultural context, it also has affinities with Vygotsky's sociocultural theory.
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Criticisms and Limitations
- Comprehensiveness and difficulty of testing: Because the theory asks us to consider every level of the environment, it is difficult to measure and test all the systems simultaneously in a single study.
- Changes in the theory and misuse: Tudge et al. (2009) pointed out that many studies cite only the early 1979 systems model and merely borrow the label “ecological” without reflecting the proximal processes and PPCT of the later bioecological model.
- Limited account of intra-individual processes: The early model described the environment in detail but said relatively little about individual cognitive and emotional development. Stage theories such as those of Piaget and Erikson fill this gap.
- Abstract practice guidelines: The perspective of “looking at the environment as well” is clear, but deciding which specific interventions to make requires combining it with other practice models.
Applying It in a Report
Child and family welfare case analysis
For a case of a child struggling to adjust to school, organizing the analysis into the microsystem (parenting attitudes, homeroom teacher, peer relationships), mesosystem (poor communication between home and school), exosystem (parents' long working hours, a shortage of local childcare services), macrosystem (a competitive education culture, childcare policy) and chronosystem (timing of the parents' divorce), and presenting an ecomap alongside, produces a polished case analysis. The child's own developmental task can be added using Erikson's industry vs. inferiority.
The CampusDown library (in Korean) also has reports that apply this theory in practice, such as 「생태체계이론으로 개입한 사례를 통합적 방법론 측면에서 개입할 때의 차이와 나의 생각」, 「학습부진과 교육복지지원사업으로 본 학교사회복지: 여덟 가지 실천 대상, 사례관리·강점관점·생태체계적 접근과 지역자원 연계」. They show how the theory can be connected to real cases. For more, try the '생태체계이론' report search.
Needs assessment and program planning
Analyzing a client's needs with Maslow's hierarchy of needs and the environmental resources and barriers surrounding those needs with ecological systems theory makes the assessment multidimensional. In a welfare organization's program plan, it can be used together with SWOT analysis, which organizes internal capabilities and the external environment, to set priorities among intervention strategies.
Education and early childhood education
Explaining the need for home–center partnership programs or parent participation activities as strengthening the mesosystem makes the theory highly useful in early childhood education reports as well.
References
- Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The Ecology of Human Development: Experiments by Nature and Design. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
- Bronfenbrenner, U. (1986). Ecology of the family as a context for human development: Research perspectives. Developmental Psychology, 22(6), 723–742.
- Bronfenbrenner, U., & Morris, P. A. (2006). The bioecological model of human development. In W. Damon & R. M. Lerner (Eds.), Handbook of Child Psychology: Vol. 1. Theoretical Models of Human Development (6th ed., pp. 793–828). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
- Germain, C. B., & Gitterman, A. (1980). The Life Model of Social Work Practice. New York: Columbia University Press.
- Hartman, A. (1978). Diagrammatic assessment of family relationships. Social Casework, 59(8), 465–476.
- Tudge, J. R. H., Mokrova, I., Hatfield, B. E., & Karnik, R. B. (2009). Uses and misuses of Bronfenbrenner's bioecological theory of human development. Journal of Family Theory & Review, 1(4), 198–210.