Implicit versus Explicit Ways of Using Bronfenbrenner's Bioecological Theory

There are many things to appreciate in Elizabeth Jaeger’s [2016] paper. Initially she does a fine job describing the development of Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological theory, showing the ways in which the theory changed over time from one that appeared (at least to his readers) to concentrate primarily on contexts of development to one in which proximal processes were placed front and center. As Jaeger notes, Bronfenbrenner had focused on context during the 1970s because contemporary developmental psychologists paid so little attention to it. However, from the start, he termed his theory “ecological” because he viewed development as arising from the interaction of individuals and the contexts in which they were situated. Given that his theory became so quickly identified as a theory of contextual influences on development, Bronfenbrenner attempted during the 1980s to deal with this misinterpretation in three related ways, each of which Jaeger describes. First, he made clear that any model of human development had to explain the processes by which development occurred; second, he paid more explicit attention to the role played by person characteristics; third, although this was always implicit in his concern with process, he made increasingly explicit his discussion of time, both longitudinal and historical. By the late 1990s, he had renamed his theory “bioecological,” placed “proximal processes” (oft-repeated engagement in activities and interactions, increasing in complexity) at the heart of his theory, and provided more detail about the different types of person characteristics that influence proximal processes as well as about different ways of conceptualizing time. Bronfenbrenner referred to the operational design to be used to test the theory as the process-person-context-time (PPCT) model.