Social Change and Human Development

It has become commonplace to consider contexts of varying proximity to the individual in theories and empirical research about human development. A major guideline for the inclusion of contexts was Bronfenbrenner's (1979) differentiation of interactional systems operating on individual development, with the macrosystem representing the interplay between factors such as culture, shared value systems, and legislation, and more immediate contexts such as family, school, workplace, and neighborhoods. Nevertheless, contexts at the macrolevel have often been treated as static givens in a certain culture at a certain historical time and have served, at best, as an interpretational backdrop for developmental findings.

Macrocontexts themselves, however, are in flux. Whereas human development is characterized as change throughout the life span, social change can be described as changes in macrocontextual conditions for human development throughout history in quite an analogous fashion. Developmental psychology can hardly offer more than this very general description, because social change has been the prominent domain of theorizing and research for sociologists (see Hallinan, 1997), not for developmental psychologists. For an emerging applied developmental science, however, it seems necessary to adopt definitions, theories, and models of social change from allied disciplines, predominantly sociology and history. The adoption of ideas about direction and lawful mechanisms of social change is a prerequisite for theory-guided forecasts concerning future contexts for development. Without such forecasts, the efforts of applied developmental science to improve human development in its contexts must remain restricted to those individual properties of humans and related developmental mechanisms that have universally proven adaptive, irrespective of time and context. In this case, however, the consideration of social change would become entirely obsolete.

Although it is beyond the scope of developmental psychologists to contribute to the debate on global versus specific theories of social change and the explanation of historical discontinuities and disruptions, some effort should be placed on conceptually clarifying social change whenever it is used in developmental research. Following this line of reasoning, (a) a definition of social change for its use in developmental analyses will be offered; (b) the question of the generalizability of social change effects and mechanisms will be raised; and (c) this will be followed by a discussion of some methodological implications of considering social change in developmental research.