Bronfenbrenner's circles: development in context

Transcript

RyanA seven-year-old named Nia has never been inside her mom's office. She doesn't even know what her mom's job really involves. But one day her mom's company announces a new policy. Employees can work from home twice a week.

SoheeAnd suddenly Nia's mom can make the school play, the dentist appointment, and dinner without rushing. Nia's life changes, because of a decision made in a building she's never seen.

RyanThat's one ring of Urie Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems model, and it's the heart of today's episode. Welcome to EPPP Prep, the podcast. I'm Ryan.

SoheeI'm Sohee. This knowledge area is about how the individual and the environment interact over time, at home, at school, at work, and in the community. And Bronfenbrenner's model is the map.

RyanA little history. Bronfenbrenner developed the model in the late 1970s, drawing on insights from the previous decade as a cofounder of the U.S. Head Start program, which aided children through education-focused childcare, nutrition services, and parenting classes.

SoheeThe model is a set of systems nested inside one another, with the individual at the core. That core includes the person's past and current psychological and physical functioning, genetic influences included.

RyanAnd as you move outward, influences become more removed from the person and less direct. The closest ones, the proximal influences, have the most direct effect.

SoheeRing one, the microsystem. These are the settings a person directly experiences: family, school, peers, health care, faith community. Parents, siblings, teachers, and the pediatrician are all actors in a child's microsystem.

RyanRing two, the mesosystem. That's the interactions between microsystems. The classic example is a parent-teacher conference. Home and school talking to each other. The child isn't even in the room, but they'll feel any follow-up.

SoheeAnother textbook example: a concerned neighbor calls a young adult's parents about their driving habits. Two microsystems, neighborhood and family, connecting.

RyanRing three, the exosystem. Settings that affect the person indirectly and are even further removed from their experience or knowledge. That's Nia's mom's workplace policy.

SoheeLifespan Development lists typical exosystem contexts: a caregiver's workplace, the broader neighborhood or town, local politics, the school board, extended family, and mass media.

RyanThe textbook also walks through a six-year-old in Minnesota named Elyse. Her microsystem is her family, two neighborhood friends, her school, her pediatrician, art class, and T-ball. Her dad volunteers at school and talks with her teachers. That's her mesosystem.

SoheeAnd her exosystem shows up at dinner. When her mother has a stressful day at work, she comes home a bit grumpier and is less fun to play with. Elyse never interacts with that workplace, but it still reaches her.

RyanRing four, the macrosystem. The broadest level: culture's beliefs and ideologies, national politics and laws, economic systems, cultural values, and religious ideology. A change here ripples through every other level, in large-scale but very indirect ways.

SoheeAnd the fifth element, the chronosystem. Bronfenbrenner's way of saying that all these contexts are moving together through historical time.

RyanThe textbook's example is the COVID-19 pandemic, both a macrosystem and a chronosystem change. And it hit people differently depending on their life stage. School at home for some, a shift to working from home for others, or moving up a retirement date.

SoheePause and think. Name the system for each. A school board votes to cut recess. A child's soccer coach and his mom text each other about his asthma. A national law changes parental leave. And a child grows up during a historic recession.

RyanThe school board is exosystem. The child never sits in those meetings, but feels the decision. The coach texting mom is mesosystem, two microsystems interacting. The national law is macrosystem. And growing up in a particular historical moment is chronosystem.

SoheeOne more piece. Bronfenbrenner later updated his model into what's often called the bioecological model, which puts the active individual at the center, engaging and growing across all the layers.

RyanAnd a related idea, dynamic systems theory, focuses on the interaction between aspects of the child, like cognition and motor skills, and their environment. The unifying theme, in the textbook's words: just as the environments influence the individual, the individual also influences the environment.

SoheeThat two-way street is exactly what this knowledge statement means by individual-environment interaction.

RyanLet's talk about time a bit more. The chronosystem is the basis for a cohort effect, the influence of a shared experience on people who are about the same age at the same time.

SoheeLifespan Development uses Generation X. They grew up without home computers but met them in school, and the internet arrived as they entered young adulthood. They've been called digital immigrants, while people born after 1980 are considered digital natives.

RyanBut the textbook adds a caution. The word cohort often describes shared experience more accurately than generation, which can slide into age stereotypes. Two people born the same year can have very different lives.

SoheeNow socioeconomic status, one of the most powerful contexts. Lifespan Development says it has three main parts: income level, educational attainment, and occupational prestige. For children, researchers use the parents' information.

RyanThe psychology textbook discusses the achievement gap, the persistent difference in grades, test scores, and graduation rates among students of different groups. Research suggests these gaps are strongly influenced by socioeconomic differences among families.

SoheeAnd it describes a famous study by Betty Hart and Todd Risley. After analyzing thirteen hundred hours of parent-child interaction, they found middle- and high-income parents talked to their children significantly more, starting in infancy.

RyanThey estimated that by age three, children from higher-income homes had heard thirty million more words. That's the famous word gap.

SoheeBut here's where the exam can get subtle. Lifespan Development reports that other research questioned Hart and Risley's methods, and suggested thirty million might be an overestimate.

RyanAnd its conclusion is that income shouldn't be considered the deciding factor. Language exposure, not income, is the strongest predictor of later language skills. Hearing more words, and more child-directed speech.

SoheeThat's a hopeful finding, because exposure is something families, programs, and communities can change. The psychology textbook mentions home visiting that encourages low-income parents to talk more with their children, and preschools that mix children from different economic backgrounds.

RyanSocioeconomic status also shapes access to the contexts that help. Lifespan Development says children from lower-income backgrounds have the most to gain from after-school programs but the least access, because of barriers like cost and transportation.

SoheePause and think, second one. A researcher concludes that low family income directly causes small vocabularies. Based on the newer research, what's the better interpretation?

RyanThat the mechanism is language exposure. Income can be linked to how much talk a child hears, but the strongest predictor is the exposure itself. Watch for answer choices that treat a correlated context as the direct cause.

SoheeLast big idea: generalizability. Lifespan Development highlights that much of psychology's research is WEIRD, drawn from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic samples, and those findings have long been assumed to apply everywhere.

RyanAnd a lovely example of culture shaping cognition through language. Korean children may have an easier time learning fractions than U.S. children, because Korean expresses one half as one of two parts. The concept is more transparent in the words themselves.

SoheeHow does the exam test all this? Mostly by asking you to place an influence in the right system. Ask two questions. Does the person directly take part in this setting? If yes, microsystem. If it's two of their settings interacting, mesosystem.

RyanIf it's a setting they never enter that still affects them, exosystem. If it's culture, laws, or economic systems, macrosystem. And if the stem is about change across historical time, like a pandemic hitting people at different life stages, chronosystem.

SoheeRecap. The individual sits at the center and is active. The microsystem is direct experience, the mesosystem is connections between those settings, the exosystem affects the person indirectly, the macrosystem is culture and broad social forces, and the chronosystem is time.

RyanCohort effects come from the chronosystem. Socioeconomic status is income, education, and occupational prestige. The word-gap research matters, but language exposure, not income itself, best predicts language skills. And remember WEIRD samples when you think about who a finding applies to.

SoheeAnd here's your own ecological model. Your study life sits inside work, family, and everything else going on in the world. If progress feels slow, it may be your context asking a lot of you, not a lack of ability.

RyanGive yourself credit for studying inside all those circles. Thanks for listening to EPPP Prep.

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