Risk Factors and Development

Ecological Systems Theory as a Guiding Theoretical Framework

Ecological frameworks recognize that each person functions within a complex network of individual, family, community, and environmental contexts that influence the availability of risk and opportunities to avoid risk. Urie Bronfenbrenner is a pioneer of the ecological model of human development, in which he describes development as the composite of individual genetic endowment, immediate family influences, and other components of the environmental context. According to Bronfenbrenner, the individual is embedded in five interrelated, nested subsystems that simultaneously influence the process of human development.

The innermost circle represents the microsystem of the individual. Within the microsystem are the individual's interactions with his or her immediate settings. Bronfenbrenner refers to these interactions as proximal processes. For most children, the family is the first and most important microsystem. As development proceeds through childhood and adolescence, additional microsystems might be sports teams, youth or church organizations, and work. Microsystems may overlap in that the same person may be a member of more than one system in a child's life. For example, a friend may be a member of the child's peer group, sports team, and class in school.

Just as the individuals interact with others in their microsystem, separate microsystems interact with each other at the level of the mesosystem. The mesosystem incorporates linkages between settings such as family, peers, teachers, and other school personnel. For example, an adolescent's ability to excel in school may depend more on the interconnections between the school and the home rather than solely on adequate performance in the classroom. In this case, Bronfenbrenner posits that the breakdown of connections between family, school, peer group, and neighborhood underlie the decline of academic achievement more so than relationships within each of these contexts alone.

Continuing the progression to increasingly distal influences on the individual, the exosystem represents external environments that the individual may or may not experience; yet events that occur in these environments affect what happens in the microsystem (an individual's immediate setting). This system includes features of the community such as availability of services or employment, access to formal and informal support, and socioeconomic climate. Parental and teacher social networks are part of the exosystem, having the potential to influence interactions with the child even though they may not directly be experienced by that child.

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