Hi everybody, this is Professor Tannenbaum. I just wanted to take a few minutes today to give you a brief overview of Uri Bronfenbrenner’s ecological theory. I really like to use this theory as a model as we go throughout the course, because it really is just such a good way of getting people to think about how complicated human development is.
People often want really simple answers to complicated questions, like why people do drugs. Well, you know, if there was ONE reason why people did drugs, we would have solved that problem by now. Clearly, there is a much more complicated answer, and it’s going to be different reasons for different people.
And so that’s where this theory comes in - it helps us to think about the different types of influences on human behavior. The idea behind Bronfenbrenner’s theory is that it’s a bunch of layers. You start with the person in the middle, and from there we go to the more immediate context and then out to the bigger picture.
So in the middle we have the individual - their age, their sex, do they have any special needs, anything like that. But then we get to what’s usually listed as the first level of his theory, which is the microsystem. And these are your immediate environments.
So for a child, this could be their school, their peers, or their family. Who do they live with or interact with, and what is their relationship with those people? Do they have supportive teachers?
Is the parent feeling stressed out by money? Are the parents fighting? Is the child being bullied?
And so on. And then for adults, your microsystem might include your job, or this class, or the place where you live. From there we go to your mesosystem, which isn’t really clearly defined in this graphic.
But the mesosystem is just the relationship between your microsystems. So for a child, for example, it might be the relationship between family and school. Do the parents get along with the teacher?
Do they trust the teacher? Do they feel comfortable going to the teacher if there is a problem? Or it might be relationships between where the kid lives and their family.
If they live in an unsafe area, how does this maybe affect the rules that their parents are setting for them? Okay, so that’s the mesosystem. The exosystem gets a little more complicated.
This is now a link between two settings: One is one that you have an immediate role in, and one is a setting that you don’t. So for parents, maybe it’s the relationship between the parent’s job and the kid’s school. If the parents have really fluctuating work hours, or have to work very long hours, the child is not directly involved in the parent’s workplace, but this will affect things like whether the parents are able to volunteer in the kid’s school.
The Anne Arundel Community College Board of Trustees would be an example of an exosystem for you, because you have probably (most of you) never met the trustees, but they do affect your immediate environment because they affect things like your tuition and fees, who we’re going to hire, College policies, and things like that. So that’s your exosystem. And then finally we have your macrosystem, which is the larger social and cultural context.
So this can be American culture, but of course that’s not one monolithic culture. So we can also talk about the culture of a religious group, or military culture, or the culture of very urban vs. rural areas.
We can also look at broad social contexts, such as the country’s political climate. And then finally, just to make this whole thing more complicated, we have the chronosystem, which in this graphic is kind of the 3D element of this image. The chronosystem has to do with the role of time.
Part of this relates to when events occur in a person’s life. For example, we can talk about how people are typically affected by becoming parents, but the effects are very different if someone becomes a parent for the first time at age 16 or 26 or 36. The other element of the chronosystem is the larger historical context.
So, for example, somebody who is in their 40s today might have different views about money, and different spending habits, compared to what today’s 20-year-olds will do when THEY are in their 40s. That’s going to be because of changes in the general cost of living, expectations of what it will cost to save for retirement, etc. So we have these layers which start at the middle and go out, but it’s important to remember that there’s not always a nice clear division between one layer and the next.
So as one example, let’s look at someone who is starting college this year, and we can think about what might affect his major and his odds of success. At the individual level, we need to look at his intelligence, his personality, and so on. At the microsystem level, we would look at what majors are even available at his local college, and whether he can afford to go elsewhere if he wants.
But then we have to look at the larger context. At the level of the mesosystem, we might want to see whether his family and his employer will be supportive. If his employer is constantly changing the guy’s work hours, he might be less likely to succeed, regardless of his intelligence or his motivation.
At the exosystem level, we might look at whether the state legislature has slashed the higher ed budget. The macrosystem is that larger cultural context, so we’d want to know if this guy’s cultural or subcultural groups view education as being worth it. And gender roles may constrain what majors he thinks are acceptable.
And finally, we’d have to look at the chronosystem. Is this guy going to college at 18, or at 48? Is he going to college in 2018, or was this during the Vietnam War when college was a good way to avoid military service, or was this during the 19th century when college was only for the wealthy, and only for a small segment of the population, and you had very different majors than you might have today?
So, I really hope that this has given you a better understanding of Bronfenbrenner’s theory. As always, please do not hesitate to ask me if you have any questions. In the meantime, I hope you have a great day!
