Bronfenbrenner, Urie

Urie Bronfenbrenner has had a profound, enduring, and generative influence on our understanding of human development. As a teacher, he has influenced generations of Cornell University students. Many of his students have gone on to earn distinction as scholars in their own right. His introductory course in human development was so popular that only Cornell's concert hall could hold all the students, and some years they spilled over into a second lecture hall connected via closed-circuit TV. Among the many thousands of students who took that course, some who became social scientists credit him with teaching them how to design research when they were freshmen. His teaching extends to detailed critiques on work in progress that he generously provides to colleagues and young scholars on campus and around the world.

Born in Moscow in 1917 and emigrating to the United States at the age of 6, Bronfenbrenner has retained his fluent command of Russian throughout his long career as a developmental scientist. In the course of his readings he became aware of the work being done by leading faculty at Moscow University, all of whom had been colleagues and disciples of Lev Vygotsky—then no longer living, but now generally recognized as one of the outstanding theorists and designers of social programs that were successful not only in halting dysfunctional development but also in producing increased competence over the subsequent life course. Bronfenbrenner felt that the Russian scientific literature would also be of interest to developmental scientists in the United States, and he began to refer to it in his publications. But at the time, not knowing the realities of the programs under way, he did so only briefly.

Then, in 1954, Bronfenbrenner had an opportunity to speak with some of these scholars at an international [Page 184]meeting in Montreal, and discovered that quite a few of them were familiar with his work and were interested in establishing a program of exchange visits between Cornell University and Moscow University. Shortly thereafter, the exchange began with several visits by Bronfenbrenner, which laid the groundwork for his book Two Worlds of Childhood (1970). These were soon followed with return visits to Cornell by Professor Alexander Vladimirovich Zaporozhits, who had primary responsibility at Moscow University for the design, direction, and scientific assessment of programs that had as their stated goal “the constructive development of children and youth,” and that included both families and schools as partners. As the program continued, other faculty and staff from both universities participated in the exchange, as did, eventually, faculty and staff from other universities as well as from government agencies in both nations. The exchanges continued until the mid-1980s, when the joint research reached completion and many of those involved had retired or were no longer living.

In addition to designing creative studies himself, Bronfenbrenner has continually discovered gems hiding in data collected by others. The most impressive of his reinterpretations would today be called a meta-analysis of research on parental practices. Taking a set of findings that others had found inconclusive at best, Bronfenbrenner (1958) separated subjects by the nature of the father's employment—manual and non-manual (admittedly crude but the best that the data allowed). He also distinguished studies according to the age of the children. Finally, he ordered the published studies by the dates when the data had been collected. This more differentiated analysis revealed a clear historical trend toward greater permissiveness, with middle-class parents leading the way. On a much smaller scale, but similarly impressive as an intellectual feat, Bronfenbrenner extracted from a study of low-birth-weight infants (Drillien, 1964) the complex and theoretically important finding that the impact of mothers' responsiveness (on an index of behavior problems at age 4) varied with family social class and with the severity of low birth weight. In brief, maternal responsiveness reduces problem behavior; it has its largest impact on children in the lowest social class and, within that class, on those of normal birth weight (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 1998).

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