Development and Psychopathology, 15 (2003), 613–640 Copyright 2003 Cambridge University Press Printed in the United States of America DOI: 10.1017.S0954579403000312 Research strategies for capturing transactional models of development: The limits of the possible ARNOLD J. SAMEROFF AND MICHAEL J. MACKENZIE University of Michigan Abstract Transactional models have informed research design and interpretation in studies relevant to developmental psychopathology. Bidirectional effects between individuals and social contexts have been found in many behavioral and cognitive domains. This review will highlight representative studies where the transactional model has been explicitly or implicitly tested. These studies include experimental, quasiexperimental, and naturalistic designs. Extensions of the transactional model have been made to interventions designed to target different aspects of a bidirectional system in efforts to improve developmental outcomes. Problems remain in the need to theoretically specify structural models and to combine analyses of transactions in the parent–child relationship with transactions in the broader social contexts. Longitudinal studies with sufficient time points to assess reciprocal processes continue to be important. Such longitudinal investigations will permit identifying developmental periods where the child or the context may be most influential or most open to change. “There’s a reason that physicists are so successful with what they do, and that is that they study the hydrogen atom and the helium atom and then they stop.” This statement attributed to Richard Feynman (Krauss, 2002) sets a low expectation for the amount of complexity that scientists can hope to explain in the field of developmental psychopathology. In physics, laws are derived that apply to every unit in a group, based on the simple assumption that all of the units are identical. All electrons are the same. In developmental psychopathology, laws are derived that apply to no one individual unit in the group. People are all different. In physics, there are laws such as E = mc2 that are thought to capture the true underlying re- This work was partially supported by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health. Address correspondence and reprint requests to: Arnold Sameroff, PhD, Center for Human Growth and Development, 300 N. Ingalls Building, 10th Level, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-0406; E-mail: [email protected]. ality of a relation, such as between energy and mass. In developmental psychopathology, there are principles or approaches or models that characterize relations between processes or characteristics but do not in themselves explain any of the variance. Such an approach is the transactional model (Sameroff, 1975; Sameroff & Chandler, 1975). The goals of developmental psychopathology are to understand the processes that lead to developmental success or dysfunction. This understanding requires explanations of continuity and discontinuity between adapted and maladapted individuals and between states of adaptation and maladaptation within individuals across time (Sameroff, 2000). One theme in developmental psychopathology is the need to understand these outcomes as residing, not in the individual, but in the adaptiveness of the relationship between individual and context (Sameroff & Emde, 1989). A requirement of such an understanding is a model of both individual and context. All too often, however, 613 Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 88.99.165.207, on 13 Jul 2017 at 01:33:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579403000312 614 that model has been missing. In a critique of developmental research, Sigel and Parke (1987) proposed deliberately separating structure from content in the design of studies of social interaction. By focusing on the structure of the study, the relations being investigated, one could have a better understanding of the content issues, whether they be the beliefs or behaviors of child or parent. Sigel and Parke described structural models of research that ranged from simple noninteractive models, where only the behavior of one partner is studied, to unidirectional models, where one partner’s effect on the other is assessed; dyadic bidirectional models of mutual influence; and then triadic and family level models, where arrows seem to proliferate exponentially. They concluded that paying attention to structural models of relationships is as important as focusing on the contents of relationships. Transactional Model An instance of a particular analytic structure is the transactional model in which the development of any process in the individual is influenced by an interplay with the individual’s context. In this approach, developmental outcomes are neither a function of the individual alone nor a function of the experiential context alone. Outcomes are a product of the combination of an individual and his or her experience. To predict outcome, a singular focus on the characteristics of the individual, in this case the child, will frequently be misleading. An analysis and assessment of the experiences available to the child needs to be added. The development of the child is a product of the continuous dynamic interactions of the child and the experience provided by his or her family and social context. What is central to the transactional model is the equal emphasis placed on the bidirectional effects of the child and of the environment. Experiences provided by the environment are not viewed as independent of the child. For developmental psychopathology a concern with the transactional model is of more than academic interest. Our concern with improving the lives of children and their families requires a clear idea of where those improve- A. J. Sameroff and M. J. MacKenzie ments are best directed. Too often these efforts have suffered for lack of an adequate developmental model. The research reviewed here should give a sense of how social interactions have been conceptualized, operationalized, and studied within a transactional framework and what we can expect in the future. However, major barriers remain to the empirical entry into a transactional system. These obstacles are theoretical (assessing a dynamic system); logistic, (developing longitudinal studies with enough time points and large enough samples); and methodological, (assessing multiple interacting domains over time in order to identify points of qualitative change). Dialectics Even when using a defined structural model, the usual employment of the transactional model in relation to child development is descriptive rather than theoretical. Research using the model attempts to find situations in which the child’s behavior changes the caregiver’s expectations and behavior and is in turn changed by the changed caregiver. In this sense the model is falsifiable (Popper, 1959). The researcher tries to determine whether the directional change in both partners occurs. However, the transactional model has also been embedded in a theory that claims that all relations between subject and object or individual and context are mutually constitutive, which may not be falsifiable. This aspect of the transactional model emerges from a major theoretical stream coupling individual and context in a relation fostering cognitive and social–emotional development. This flow runs from philosophers like Hegel (1910) and Marx (1912) to pioneers in developmental science like Vygotsky (1962) and Piaget (1952) who emphasized the active role of the knower in creating knowledge through contradictions between knowing and the known. The dialectical core of the process was transactional in that the child was changed by experience and experience was changed by the child’s more complex understandings. The exceptional within the universal Although these dialectical and transactional processes apply to all domains of development, Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 88.99.165.207, on 13 Jul 2017 at 01:33:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579403000312 Transactional models our interest in developmental psychopathology will focus on areas of social and emotional functioning that characterize mental health and illness. For infants with a variety of perceptual and cognitive deficits, the experience of social relationships will be exceptional. However, here one of the key issues in developmental psychopathology comes into play: the continuity–discontinuity question (Sameroff, 2000). Are differences in the child’s or caregiver’s behavior quantitative or qualitative? For the anencephalic child with no cortex, there is no psychological world; but does a deaf or blind child have a qualitatively or quantitatively different experience of reality? Clearly, if the analysis is restricted to the deviant modality (hearing or sight), there is a qualitative difference; but if the analysis is broadened, we find that children with either sensory loss gain an appreciation of objects and relationships in the world through the use of other senses, which is an example of developmental equifinality (Cicchetti, 1993). On the experience side, we find the same issues. There are qualitative deficits in caregiving such as infanticide or starvation to which children cannot adapt; but there are other extreme variations, such as the absence of touch or positive affective expression, that the child would survive. The developmental question is to determine the varieties of adaptation that occur. Would such experiences produce a social isolate, or would there be alternative modalities of social experience that would still permit an integration into the individual’s family or culture? In our review of research directed at examining transactional processes, we will identify the limitations of experimental research in studying such deviances in child or context. We cannot assign individuals to be handicapped or caregivers to be abusive, but through quasiexperimental designs and natural experiments, some understanding of the effects of abnormality in either child or context can be obtained. Bidirectional models The descriptive aspect of the transactional model emerged from the pioneering tempera- 615 ment research of Thomas, Chess, Birch, Hertzig and Korn (1963) and Bell’s (1968) reinterpretation of direction of effects research. Both efforts were to counter what Chess (1964) labeled the mal de mère orientations of psychoanalytic and behavioral theories that parenting caused child behavior and, more explicitly, that bad mothering caused bad children. Bell showed that many parent behaviors were not emitted in the service of socializing the child but rather were elicited by the child’s characteristics and behavior. Thomas, Chess, and Birch (1968) elucidated a clear transactional developmental path for a subset of children with difficult temperaments. These children stimulated maladaptive parenting that led to their later behavioral disturbance. For children who did not have this transaction occur (whose parents were not negatively reactive to the temperaments of their children), no such pathway to behavioral deviance was found. Building on these descriptive studies of parent–child relationships, Sameroff and Chandler (1975) proposed that transactional processes had to be considered as central to developmental theory. Children were seen as engaged in active organization and reorganization so that constants could not be found in a set of traits; rather, they were found in the processes by which these traits were maintained by the relationship between children and their experience in a variety of social settings. Bell and Harper (1977) found it logically compelling that “if parents are effective, they must be affected by the products of their tutelage” (p. 55). In other contemporary domains of psychology, Bandura’s (1978) work on reciprocal determinism and Berne’s earlier (1961) clinical formulations used the transaction concept to describe similar dynamic aspects of interpersonal behavior. These early views have become central to current models of regulation and self-regulation that are permeating the developmental literature (cf. Boekaerts, Pintrich, & Zeidner, 2000; Bradley, 2000). The individual is seen not only as having a major role in modifying social experience through both eliciting and selecting processes, but also as having a major role in modifying biological experience through both stress reactions and medication (Cicchetti & Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 88.99.165.207, on 13 Jul 2017 at 01:33:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579403000312 616 Tucker, 1994). These regulations occur on the biopsychosocial interfaces of human functioning. The biological revolution that has captured the imagination of both scientists and the public has been framed as the search for genes that cause the biological and even psychological ills of society. In that search process, however, the real revolution is the massive discoveries about the complexity of biological functioning, especially the complexity of interactions between each level of functioning from the gene to the whole organism (Gottlieb, 1991). The appreciation of complexity in psychological development is less of an outlier when the same complexity is found at what are considered to be more fundamental levels. Contemporary reconceptualizations of temperament have been part of these advances. Instead of conceptualizing temperament as a set of traits inherent in the child, it is seen as a set of individual differences in the way children regulate experience (Rothbart & Bates, 1998). This view makes temperament a relational construct rather than a personal one. Another area that illustrates the child contribution to transactional pathways involves the maltreatment of children living under the care and supervision of the child welfare system. In theory, upon removal from an abusive situation, children should go on to more positive outcomes. Unfortunately, this does not seem to be universally true in that some are maltreated by later caretakers including foster parents (Milowe, Lourie, & Parrott, 1964). Something seems to be different in these children that is carried forward into new relationships. Children who are maltreated while in care seem to have higher rates of prior maltreatment than children who do not go on to be maltreated in care (Benedict, Zuravin, Somerfield, & Brandt, 1996). The changes wrought in these children by the maltreatment experience move forward in time, influencing their future relationships. Positive and negative feedback Regulation typically involves negative feedback systems that restore a homeostatic setpoint. Sensitive parent–child interactions can be seen as deviation reducing when the goal A. J. Sameroff and M. J. MacKenzie of the caregiver is to have an optimal interactive partner. The optimal partner is awake and attentive, but some children may be below (e.g., drowsy or inattentive) or above this setpoint (e.g., distressed or overactive). The caregiver in the first case would use behaviors designed to arouse and focus the child, whereas in the second case the strategies would be designed to soothe and settle the child. Bell and Harper (1977) labeled these as lower and upper limit control reactions. Reducing the deviation between actual and desired responsivity will take different forms, depending on the starting point of the interaction; but this limit setting can be extended over longer periods of interaction. Interactive systems can also be deviation amplifying, using positive feedback to move away from a set-point. This amplification can be intended or unintended. For example, observations comparing father–child and mother– child interaction sequences (Parke, Cassidy, Burks, Carson, & Boyum, 1992) have found that fathers frequently engage in play behaviors aimed at making the child more excited. These amplifying interactions ultimately reach a limit, and the father’s stimulating behavior is reduced to bring the child to a more settled state. This intended amplification can be contrasted to the unintended consequences of inept parental responses to child aggression as found in the work of Patterson and colleagues (Patterson, 1986; Patterson & Bank, 1989). When the higher or lower level of stimulation becomes a consistent pattern, the system changes and the consequences are qualitative rather than quantitative differences. Two such examples are the Pygmalion and Matthew effects named after Greek and Christian religious figures, respectively. The Pygmalion effect was proposed by Rosenthal and Jacobson (1968) as a way of raising children’s IQs by raising teacher’s expectations about them. The transaction began from outside the interaction system when teachers were provided with information that randomly selected students had high potential. The teachers’ changed beliefs changed their behavior, and the IQ of the selected students increased. Although the Pygmalion effect is controversial (Spitz, 1999), meta-analyses have confirmed it with the quali- Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 88.99.165.207, on 13 Jul 2017 at 01:33:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579403000312 Transactional models fication that the less the teachers knew about the children before the attempt to change their attitudes, the larger was the effect (Raudenbush, 1984). Derived from the statement in the gospels, “To the man who has, more will be given until he grows rich; the man who has not will lose what little he has” (Matthew 13:12), the Matthew effect is a clear example of a deviation amplifying process in which small differences early in development diverge through positive feedback mechanisms into later larger differences (Walberg & Tsai, 1983). The Matthew effect model was first applied to child development by Stanovich (1986) to provide a theoretical framework for the study and explanation of individual differences in reading ability, whereby better readers get further ahead and those who are behind at an early point become increasingly so (Bast & Reitsma, 1998). Starting in kindergarten, with small differences in letter recognition between high and low ability children, there was a sharp divergence as the children who were ahead became increasingly more advanced and those who were behind became increasingly delayed. In a related study, Ma (1999) not only found evidence for the fan-spread phenomenon among students within schools but also found it between different schools. Small differences between high and low performing schools in the earlier grades tended to increase over time. Statistical operationalization Although the transactional model originates from a strongly dialectic, organismic orientation, any operationalization requires a mechanistic measurement model, in which dynamic processes are reduced to static scores that can then be entered into statistical analyses. The simplest of these is a two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and a good theory. If the theory is that infants with difficult temperament who evoke negative reactions in their parents will have more negative outcomes (Thomas et al., 1968), then one can dichotomize infants into difficult versus nondifficult temperament and dichotomize parents into negative reactors and nonnegative reactors and test for a statistical interaction effect on the outcome. Although this 617 once seemed a simplistic approach, it fits well with the person-oriented methods that are becoming more common in developmental research (Magnusson & Bergman, 1984, 1990). As opposed to variable-oriented approaches, the questions for person-oriented approaches are about individuals rather than characteristics of individuals. Theoretically and operationally, transactions need to be separated from interactions. Interactions are documented by finding dependencies in which the activity of one element is correlated with the activity of another, for example, when a smile is reciprocated by a smile, which elicits further smiling, and the correlations are stable over time. Transactions are documented where the activity of one element changes the usual activity of another, either quantitatively, by increasing or decreasing the level of the usual response, or qualitatively, by eliciting or initiating a new response, for example, when a smile is reciprocated by a frown, which may elicit confusion, negativity, or even increased anxious positivity. This is especially confusing when one statistical test of a “transaction” is to find a statistical “interaction.” Since 1975, advances in statistical methodology, and especially the ease of use of computer statistical packages for doing regression analyses, have moved toward more sophisticated approaches that can utilize more information in continuous distributions. Methodological advances were given theoretical significance with the publication of Baron and Kenny’s (1986) article on the distinction between moderator and mediator effects and how to use regression analyses to find them. These authors were concerned that intervening third variables between a predictor and outcome had been lumped into a general category with the two constructs being used indiscriminately. Analyses of transactional processes generally had sought a mediating variable in the social context that explained the relation between the child’s condition at two points in time. Such analyses may be important for understanding developmental progress but less so for understanding transactions. Transactions generally require a moderator analysis, for example, the quality or quantity of the parental response changes the relation between the child’s ear- Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 88.99.165.207, on 13 Jul 2017 at 01:33:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579403000312 618 lier and later behavior. The regression techniques for testing the interplay between child and context are essentially an extension of the two-way ANOVA model. In the regression model, the significance of a Parent Negative Reactivity × Infant Temperament interaction variable is tested while controlling for the separate effects of temperament and reactivity on child outcomes. These regression models have been enlarged to incorporate a variety of mediators and moderators with a rapid proliferation of causal arrows. Simple regression paths have been subsumed in the general area of structural equation modeling, again following the technical advances in computer statistical programs since the advent of LISREL (Joreskog & Sorbom, 1984). Baron and Kenny (1986) suggest that the choice between a mediator and moderator analysis should be based on whether the relation between the primary predictor and criterion variables is stronger or weaker. If there is a strong relation, then mediator analyses are recommended, but if there is an unexpected weak or inconsistent relation, the recommendation is to seek a moderator. In terms of our example, if the relation between temperament and mental health were mediated, then there would be a high correlation between temperament and behavior problems and all children with difficult temperaments would have worse outcomes than all children with easy temperaments because all parents would react negatively to infant difficulty and positively to infant easiness. In contrast, in moderated relations a number of different pathways can be taken. In our example, there is a weak correlation between temperament and later mental health, meaning that a sizable number of infants with easy temperaments could have bad outcomes and a sizable number of infants with difficult temperaments could have good outcomes. In the Thomas et al. (1968) study, 10% of the sample had difficult temperaments and represented 25% of the children with later behavioral problems. But 30% of the difficult infants did not have behavior problems, and of the children who did have behavior problems, 75% had not had difficult temperaments. Use of a transactional model forces an a priori, rather A. J. Sameroff and M. J. MacKenzie than an a posteriori, decision to use a moderator statistical test. If the hypothesis is that the relation between an earlier and later state of the infant is determined by the nature of the response of parents or other social agents, then one must examine the differential impact of different caregiving responses. Some investigators attempt to finesse the moderator analysis by preselecting either infants or parents in one category or another (usually a high-risk group). Again using our example, if only difficult infants are included in the sample, then parental reactivity would be linearly related to outcome and a mediator test would be sufficient. However, one would not be able to generalize to nondifficult infants because there is no way to know if parent reactivity is linearly related or unrelated to child outcome without examining the relation in the rest of the population. Although Baron and Kenny (1986) went a long way toward resolving the definitional ambiguity surrounding mediating and moderating variables, there remained a need for clear operational definitions that could eliminate barriers to application specifically in the area of risk research and developmental psychopathology (Hinshaw, 2002). Recent efforts have been made to expand on the mediator and moderator work toward increasing our understanding of how multiple risks operate together (Kraemer, Stice, Kazdin, Offord, & Kupfer, 2001), especially with regard to intervention trials (Kraemer, Wilson, Fairburn, & Agras, 2002). Cicchetti and Hinshaw (2002a) see these efforts as necessary in order to bring clinical treatment research into the realm of exploratory research to inform causal processes and basic developmental theory. To this end, Kraemer et al. (2001, 2002) provided an alternative perspective using a stepwise approach for identifying the different ways in which two risk factors can work together to affect a particular binary or dimensional outcome to differentiate between a moderator and a mediator. Moderators were conceptualized as useful in addressing a central question of clinical treatment by identifying on whom and under what circumstances interventions have different effects, whereas mediators identify the mechanisms linking treatment and out- Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 88.99.165.207, on 13 Jul 2017 at 01:33:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579403000312 Transactional models come (Kraemer et al., 2002). What sets their framework apart from the conceptual work of Baron and Kenny (1986) is the emphasis on temporal precedence and association with treatment. A moderator variable, as defined by Kraemer and colleagues (2002), must precede treatment and random assignment. A mediator variable, on the other hand, occurs after random assignment and has its effect during the intervention. The temporal placement also impacts the association of the variable of interest with treatment. Because potential moderators, such as gender or socioeconomic status, are identified and measured prior to randomization, they are not correlated with treatment assignment. In contrast, mediators, which are active during the intervention and point to the underlying causal processes, are associated with assignment to the treatment group (Kraemer et al., 2002). Testing the Transactional Model In the nearly three decades since Sameroff and Chandler (1975) first articulated the transactional model, it has been referenced extensively in the developmental literature and rated as 1 of the 20 studies that revolutionized child psychology (Dixon, 2002). All too often, however, it is used to emphasize a linear environmentalism at the expense of the more complex interplay between dynamic systems. The perceived methodological difficulty inherent in elucidating reciprocal pathways has resulted in limited empirical evidence (Lynch & Cicchetti, 1998). These issues include determining the appropriate time interval in longitudinal studies, deciding whether to attend to behavior or cognitive representations of the participants, and determining the different influences that may be active at each point in the development of the process of concern. Is the concern with microanalysis of real time contingent interactions or macroanalysis of influences at one stage of development on processes in a later stage? Is the concern with changes in behavior or changes in attitudes, beliefs, or representations, which may or may not be expressed in behavior? Is the concern with processes that induce, facilitate, or maintain a change in behavior or representations? 619 Despite these problems, some researchers have taken up the challenge, and there are growing bodies of research in several developmental domains that have set about testing transactional models and disentangling complex bidirectional processes. What follows is an overview of some of these research efforts and the effectiveness of four different types of strategies employed to test bidirectional effects. First, we will discuss examples of both explicit and implicit testing of transactional models. The selected studies range from normative developmental processes through the life span, to examples of direct relevance to developmental psychopathology, such as pathways to aggression, substance abuse problems, and depression. Second, our focus will turn to research strategies that attempt to gain a point of entry into circular processes through the manipulation of one of the variables. Examples include labeling experiments and the training of child confederates in order to tease apart the impact of actual child behavior and the influence of adult beliefs and attitudes on interactions and downstream outcomes. Third, we provide a discussion of natural experiment strategies when true experimental designs are not available to the researcher. Although such experiments bring with them clear limitations, several researchers have been able to capitalize on such opportunities and make substantial contributions to our knowledge of reciprocal influences across time. The last area to be covered involves the capacity for intervention studies to inform our understanding of transactional effects (see Cicchetti & Hinshaw, 2002b). The implementation of intervention programs aimed at either the child or the parent, which show later effects in the behavior of the other, provide strong evidence for transactional processes. In a similar fashion to the manipulation designs, intervention studies provide a starting point from which one can observe the transactional processes that play out over time. Explicit and implicit research strategies Bell’s (1968) reinterpretation of the direction of effects in studies of child development, drawing attention to the contributions made by the Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 88.99.165.207, on 13 Jul 2017 at 01:33:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579403000312 620 behavior and characteristics of the child, was an important first step in qualifying socialization models where parent and culture linearly determined child behavior. The second step was realizing that new emphases on child effects did not provide a complete picture unless they were spelled out over time in a model of reciprocal influences. Certain of the studies to be presented represent the results of explicit efforts to look for bidirectional influences and test transactional models; others were less direct in their approach but nonetheless provide implicit evidence for transactional processes in their findings. Examples range from the formation of the infant–caregiver relationship through to the impact of the home environment and parenting practices on school performance. Reciprocal influences in early development. Evidence of transactional processes can be found at all points in development. Some of the earliest involve the establishment of the unique infant–caregiver attachment relationship. Attachment theorists (Sroufe, Carlson, Levy, & Egeland, 1999) have argued that the quality of this relationship has great implications for subsequent events, while at the same time being intimately tied to events of the past. In an investigation of the development of secure infant–mother attachment relationships over the first year of life, Crockenberg (1981) examined the influences of both child and mother characteristics. These included infant irritability assessed during the neonatal period and maternal responsiveness assessed when the infant was 3 months of age. In analyzing the importance of social support to the process, they found it to be the best predictor of the presence of a secure attachment at 12 months of age. Moreover, they found a statistical interaction with social support that was most important for mothers with irritable babies. Reduced social support seemed to increase maternal unresponsiveness, which was associated with infant resistance during reunion episodes of the strange situation. These findings point to bidirectional pathways whereby irritable infants are more likely to develop insecure attachment relationships as a result of the unresponsive mothering that is characteristic of contexts that offer limited social support. Crockenberg (1981) con- A. J. Sameroff and M. J. MacKenzie cluded that these findings are best understood from a transactional perspective, including an appreciation for the role played by the child “in eliciting particular patterns of interactions or in determining the effect of certain mother behaviors on subsequent development” (p. 858). Examples of the impact of maternal beliefs and preferences on downstream child functioning come from work on the preference of mothers for one twin versus the other (Minde, Corter, Goldberg, & Jeffers, 1990). Most mothers came to prefer one of the twins as early as the first 2 weeks after birth. These preferences tended to be stable, lasting for at least the 4 years during which the families were followed in the study. The particular aspect of the child triggering the transaction varied, with some mothers preferring the temperamentally easier and healthier children and others preferring the more “strong-willed” or sickly of the twin pair. Whichever child characteristic triggered the maternal preference, the preferred twins had higher scores on the Bayley scales at 12 months of age and on the Stanford Binet at age 4 and fewer behavior problems at 4. Minde et al. (1990) were able to use this twin study design to highlight the transactional nature of socialization processes through an examination of the extent to which maternal attributions about their infants lead to differential responsiveness, which then serves to affect later child outcomes in ways that confirm and solidify their initial preferences. Beyond early childhood, transactional processes continue to play themselves out in the child’s ever widening social context. Focusing on a specific population of slow-learning adolescents, Nihira, Mink, and Meyers (1985) examined the reciprocal influence of the child and the home environment on child social competence, psychological adjustment, and selfconcept. This 3-year longitudinal study was designed to determine whether a high quality home environment produces competent and high functioning children or if more competent children elicit better parenting. Evidence was found to support both of these “competing” hypotheses in a transactional developmental sequence. Cognitive and social environmental stimulation in the home influences the adolescents’ subsequent outcomes and ad- Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 88.99.165.207, on 13 Jul 2017 at 01:33:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579403000312 Transactional models olescent functioning produced changes in the home environment. Finding reciprocal processes highlights the importance of including an analysis of both child and environmental effects and the need for longitudinal strategies to flesh out the bidirectional pathways over time. Pomerantz and Eaton (2001) also employed such a longitudinal strategy in their exploration of potential transactional processes involving child academic achievement and maternal intrusive support. The core concern of this study involved the mechanism(s) by which problems in children’s academic achievement elicit reactions from their parents and whether these parental responses serve to amplify or constrain the child’s behavior. A model was proposed whereby low child achievement leads to maternal worry and child uncertainty, both of which contribute to maternal intrusive support, impacting later child achievement. The hypotheses were tested using a three wave longitudinal design over an 18-month period for children in Grades 4–6. In addition to the more long-term analysis, Pomerantz and Eaton (2001) utilized hierarchical linear modeling to perform a day to day sequential analysis to determine how mothers react to their children’s daily academic failure and success. They hypothesized that mothers would increase their use of intrusive support following failure and decrease their use following success. Support was found for the model, suggesting that children’s low achievement indicates the need for increased intrusive-support practices on the part of the mother because of increased maternal worrying and child uncertainty. In a constraining negative feedback process, the heightened intrusive support led to improvements in child academic achievement 6 months later. Similar results were found in the day to day analysis, in which intrusive support in response to child failure resulted in improved performance in the following days and a decrease in reliance on intrusive support. Their study moved beyond simply stating that children and parents both play contributing roles in development to attain a more detailed understanding of the actual transactional processes involved. Bidirectional socialization effects involving shyness and social withdrawal. Studies have 621 addressed transactional processes in the area of child shyness, anxiety, and social withdrawal. In an investigation of the transaction between parents’ perceptions of their children’s social wariness/inhibition and their parenting styles, Rubin, Nelson, Hastings, and Asendorpf (1999) explored the direction of influence between children’s shyness and their parents’ attitudes regarding socialization practices. A longitudinal design was used in which questionnaires dealing with child temperament and parenting practices were distributed to parents when their children were 2 and 4 years old and observations of child inhibition were made at the initial 2-year-old assessment; parental perceptions of their children’s shyness at age 2 were found to be stable and predicted discouragement of independence at age 4, but they were unrelated to observed shyness at 4. LaFreniere and Dumas (1992) used a transactional analysis of early childhood anxiety and social withdrawal to account for bidirectional contributions. Preschool children were classified into three groups; socially competent, average, and anxious–withdrawn based on the ratings of their preschool teachers. Mother– child dyads were then observed during a problem-solving task to determine the extent to which the dyads responded contingently to each others’ behavior and affective displays were assessed. The mothers of the socially competent children were more contingent, displayed more positive affect and behaviors, and exhibited more coherent discipline strategies, whereas the mothers of anxious–withdrawn children engaged in high levels of negative reciprocity. Even though the children were placed into the three categories based on the ratings of their preschool teachers, these categories were strongly associated with maternal behavior. LaFreniere and Dumas (1992) conclude that through a transactional process a prior disturbance in the child–parent relationship becomes internalized and carried forward by the child into subsequent interactions, where teachers and peers then perceive him or her as less competent. Cycles of coercion in the development of aggression. The work of Gerald Patterson and colleagues on aggressive behavior in children Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 88.99.165.207, on 13 Jul 2017 at 01:33:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579403000312 622 represents perhaps the most theoretically and empirically well-developed example we have to date of transactional processes in developmental psychopathology. Patterson (1982) hypothesized that the etiology of antisocial behavior has its roots in family interactions and the cycle of behavioral responses of one family member to another over time. Patterson used structural equation modeling to examine what he calls cycles of coercion, in which inept parenting skills trigger a process that results in an antisocial child who is rejected by healthy peers, struggles academically, and is left with low self-esteem. Early failures in effective disciplining of minor child coercive behaviors leads to reciprocal exchanges in which the child and his or her parents and siblings become increasingly aversive. What may start as developmentally appropriate noncompliance on the part of the young child predictably escalates to physical aggression. Patterson proposed that families characterized by unskilled parents, a child with a difficult temperament, and the presence of stressors at multiple levels of the ecology were at greater risk for the initiation of coercive cycles. The escalating transactional nature of this positive feedback loop is best illustrated by Patterson’s (1986) own words, “What leads to things getting out of hand may be a relatively simple affair, whereas the process itself, once initiated, may be the stuff of which novels are made” (p. 442). Although holding that the initiation of the coercive cycle begins with a failure of the parent to maintain child compliance, Patterson and Bank (1989) recognize that there may be reasons for onset of inept discipline practices that lie outside of the parent. There is a clear impact of ecological stress on the parents’ capacity for effectively disciplining their child, and the possibility exists that the child’s contributions such as difficult temperament may tax the limits of the parents’ capacities. The maintenance of the coercive cycle is attributable to dynamic escalations among the interacting partners, which serve to reciprocally change behaviors; this makes the child more difficult to discipline effectively, further taxing the parents and making them more rejecting, and leading to more physical and violent forms of coercion being exhibited by both child A. J. Sameroff and M. J. MacKenzie and parent (Patterson & Bank, 1989). The changed child will then enter into similar cycles of negative reinforcement over time with siblings and eventually with teachers and peers outside of the family context. These contingencies serve to maintain and amplify the child’s antisocial behavior. However, these processes are not always amplifying. In a constraining process, parents with a greater capacity for effective discipline (a moderator variable) are able to respond to early mildly coercive child behavior in a consistent and predictable nonharsh manner, leading to a decrease in the negative child behavior and a return to adaptive functioning. Anderson, Lytton, and Romney (1986) examined the issue of child contributions to the initiation of coercive cycles in some depth. They utilized a design that compared the reactions of mothers of conduct disordered and normal boys to their own children and to nonfamiliar children who were either conduct disordered or normal. Both groups of mothers were more negative with conduct disordered children than they were with nondisordered children. The conduct disordered children were less compliant, independent of the type of mother they were interacting with. The authors concluded that the child’s behavior is the major influence in conduct disorder. There was evidence of transactional effects, however, in that mothers of conduct disordered children exhibited more negative affect with their own children than with nonfamiliar conduct disordered children, pointing to the importance of past relationship history and to expectations and behavior. Although the data from this study were interpreted as implicating child characteristics as primary, it must be noted that the children in the study were 6–11 years of age by which point the coercive cycles outlined by Patterson and colleagues (Patterson, 1982; Patterson & Bank, 1989) may already be firmly entrenched. Reciprocal amplifying processes involving aggression and negativity continue as children move through school and into adulthood (Kim, Conger, Lorenz, & Elder, 2001; Stoolmiller, 2001). Their relationships, initially restricted to the family, broaden to include peers and eventually intimate romantic relationships. Ca- Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 88.99.165.207, on 13 Jul 2017 at 01:33:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579403000312 Transactional models paldi, Dishion, Stoolmiller, and Yoerger (2001) elucidated the mechanism by which young men become aggressive toward female partners. The authors proposed that parenting was important to early socialization and the selection of the peer group in adolescence. The peer group then takes on an important socializing role and, in a path-dependent fashion, further locks an individual into the trajectory started with the earlier family relationships. Capaldi et al. (2001) believe that this normative trajectory is important for the establishment of a romantic relationship, which eventually completes the cycle by providing the context for parenting the next generation. On the negative side, they found a transactional pathway whereby boys’ antisocial behavior in early adolescence was associated with subsequent deviant peer associations in middle adolescence, which, in turn, was prospectively associated with hostile talk about women in late adolescence. The acceptance and reinforcement of hostile talk and attitudes about women in the late adolescent peer group was predictive of physical aggression toward a female partner in young adulthood. Pathways to substance use problems. There is good reason to believe that the onset of substance use and abuse may follow a transactional socialization process similar to the one outlined by Patterson and others for aggression and conduct problems. Recognizing that these two problems are often found to co-occur during adolescence, Stice and Barrera (1995) examined the transactional influences between parenting and adolescents’ problem behaviors. Strong support was found for a transactional pathway, starting with an association between deficits in both parenting support and control and subsequent adolescent substance use. In turn, adolescent substance use was related to subsequent decreases in the levels of parental support and control. Brody and Ge (2001) tested a transactional model involving parenting practices, adolescent self-regulation, psychological functioning, and alcohol use outcomes. Evidence was found to support two transactional models. In the first model, child self-regulation at 12 years was found to be prospectively related to con- 623 flicted and harsh parenting at 13 years, which in turn was related to subsequent depression, hostility, and self-esteem at 14 years. The second model was similar except that, rather than psychological functioning, it involved alcohol use, negative consequences, and symptomatic drinking. As youth move into late adolescence it would be expected that the influence of peers would begin to gain prominence. The earlier parent–child relationship experiences undoubtedly influence the quality of future peer interactions, but entirely new socialization mechanisms are introduced as those peer relationships become more firmly established during adolescence. Facing these sorts of questions, Dishion and Owen (2002) picked up where Brody and colleagues left off and carried out an exploration of potential bidirectional influences of peer relationships and substance use from early adolescence through to young adulthood. The results supported a transactional model, as deviant friendship processes in early adolescence were related to subsequent substance use in middle adolescence, which influenced the selection of deviant friends in late adolescence. Deviant friendship processes in late adolescence, in turn, prospectively predicted higher levels of substance use in young adulthood. These findings underscore the deepening complexity of these transactional processes as development unfolds and aspects of the parent– child relationship become internalized and carried forward into the child’s ever widening social world. Psychopathology. Evidence for transactional models of development can also be found in other areas of developmental psychopathology such as depression (Cicchetti & Schneider– Rosen, 1984, 1986). Potential models account not only for the development and course of the disorder in children but also for the impact of psychopathology in a parent on the socialization process. An example of a study that explored the latter was carried out by Hammen, Burge, and Stansbury (1990). They investigated the influence of both mother and child characteristics on child outcomes in a population of school-aged children with depressed mothers. The purpose of their study Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 88.99.165.207, on 13 Jul 2017 at 01:33:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579403000312 624 was to move beyond the consistent linear finding that the children of mothers suffering from depression are at risk for psychopathology to an examination of the reciprocal influence of mothers and children on each other. They found evidence for a negative reciprocal influence, where maternal functioning was related to subsequent child symptoms and dysfunction, and child characteristics were in turn prospectively associated with maternal functioning. Such a model fit with the authors’ expectations for an amplifying transactional process, where, through a positive feedback process, deviant child behavior, arising from earlier maternal dysfunction, contributes to later maternal depressive symptomatology. There is an escalation of dysfunction in the child and the parent as these processes play out over time. Relationship impairments may be expected between boys diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and their mothers. A transactional framework was used to examine maternal responsiveness and child characteristics in a population of 7- to 10year-old boys with ADHD (Johnston, Murray, Hinshaw, Pelham, & Hoza, 2002). Maternal responsiveness was negatively related to later maternal depressive symptoms and child conduct problems. Child conduct problems were related to later maternal responsiveness, but no such association was found for child ADHD symptoms. The design strategy employed by Johnston et al. (2002) to assess reciprocal processes allowed them to begin to tease apart the different factors involved and to disentangle issues of comorbidity. They speculated that in a mutually enforcing process, maternal depression leads to deficits in responsive parenting contributing to child conduct problems, while at the same time child behavior that is difficult to manage, such as ADHD, contributes to deficits in maternal responsiveness. Experimental manipulations There is great difficulty inherent in separating the direction of effects in a natural setting. The drive to better understand the bidirectional influences focused researchers on experimental attempts to disentangle the contributions A. J. Sameroff and M. J. MacKenzie from both parent and child through the design of experimental studies in which the characteristics or behavior of the child were manipulated in order to test the impact on adult behavior. Three such areas of research will serve as examples. The first involves the use of trained child confederates to examine the impact of child responsiveness on adults who vary in their attributional style. The second and third focus on the impact of experimentally assigned child labels on adult behavior, either related to gender or infant prematurity. Through controlling for characteristics of the target child (in most cases, by using the same child), the response of the adult to the labeled child can be wholly attributed to the beliefs that the adult holds regarding the label given to the infant. However, as follow-up studies began to look at subsequent child behavior arising as a result of the influence of induced adult beliefs on child interaction styles, the transactional nature of these three processes was revealed. All three areas involved testing if parental beliefs about a child acted in a selffulfilling, positive feedback manner to influence interactions and elicit child behavior patterns that confirm and maintain those beliefs. Bugental’s attribution studies. Utilizing an elegant experimental manipulation design, Bugental and her colleagues explored the association of child responsiveness and controllability with adult attribution and interaction styles. Initially, Bugental, Caporael, and Shennum (1980) established the first component of a transactional relationship, demonstrating that child behavior impacts adult attitudes and behaviors. They were interested in studying a moderating role for adult control attributions in the relationship between child controllability and adult assertiveness. The experimental design entailed the training of 7- to 9-year-old boys to act as confederates who would interact with high or low internal control parents. The children were trained to either be responsive or unresponsive while interacting with an unfamiliar adult on a toy construction task. The authors found a statistical interaction in which unresponsiveness on the part of the child confederates would impact only the be- Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 88.99.165.207, on 13 Jul 2017 at 01:33:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579403000312 Transactional models havior of adults with low internal control perceptions. These low power adults were less assertive with unresponsive children. Bugental and Shennum (1984) went on to examine what impact the differential adult behavior had on subsequent child behavior. In their landmark monograph they proposed and found evidence for such a transactional process. Their second hypothesis, which is important to the transactional component, was that these adult attributions would lead to a Rosenthal effect, whereby differential adult behavior would elicit child behavior that confirms and maintains those attitudes and beliefs. Child confederates were once again trained for their responsiveness and assertiveness and placed with unfamiliar mothers who differed on two attributional domains: their self-perceived power as caregivers and the social power they attributed to children (Bugental & Shennum, 1984). Analysis of the videotaped interaction task pointed to two separate transactional sequences. On the one hand, mothers low on self-perceived power responded to unresponsive children with a communication style containing more negative affect and unassertive positive affect. In turn, the unresponsive children reacted to the low self-power mothers with continued unresponsiveness, staying in their assigned role throughout the interaction. On the other hand, mothers who were high in the social power they attributed to children reacted to unassertive or shy children with a strong and affectively positive communication style. The unassertive children responded to this differential action of the mothers with increased assertiveness, coming out of their assigned role as the interaction progressed. The first sequence is an example of a positive feedback process, whereby a behavior or attribute of the child is amplified through the transaction with an interactive partner. The second sequence, on the other hand, is an example of a negative feedback process, in which the actions of the interactive partner leads to a decrease in the behavior (unassertiveness) exhibited by the child. Bugental and Shennum (1984) concluded that adults bring with them to the parenting role a set of beliefs about relationships with children based on their history of social 625 experiences, which influence the interpretations the adult makes about a child’s behavior, the subsequent behavioral responses of the adult, and in a transactional fashion the downstream behavior of the child. As we have seen, this influence on later child behavior can either be amplifying or constraining. A series of studies followed these earlier efforts, for the most part strongly supporting the transactional process through which adult attributions have their impact (e.g. Bugental, 1987). The specific questions of interest also evolved to include investigations of transactional behavioral patterns with implications for teacher–child relationships, interpersonal violence, and child abuse (Bugental & Johnston, 2000; Bugental, Lewis, Lin, Lyon, & Kopeikin, 1999; Bugental, Lyon, Lin, McGrath, & Bimbella, 1999). Katsurada and Sugawara (2000) also applied this research strategy to study the effect of maternal attributions on the trajectory of aggressive behavior in their own child and found that low power mothers exhibited more negative affect toward their children following noncompliance. The difference between low and high power mothers only emerged when the child was aggressive, and power attributions had no effect when the child was not displaying aggression. Gender labeling studies. Beginning with the study of “Baby X” (Seavey, Katz, & Zalk, 1975), an extensive literature has emerged focusing on the effect of gender labels on the response of adults to infants. An experimental approach is required to determine if adult stereotypes and attitudes promote gender differences or if gender-specific differences in infant behavior elicit differential responses by adults (Stern & Karraker, 1989). In the earliest study Seavey et al. (1975) observed adults interacting with a neutrally clothed infant who was introduced as a boy, as a girl, or with no gender information given. Both male and female adults were more likely to select gender-stereotyped toys for the infant if introduced as a girl. In the condition when no gender label was given, all adult subjects made efforts to guess the gender of the child, which were influenced by stereotyped behavior. For Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 88.99.165.207, on 13 Jul 2017 at 01:33:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579403000312 626 instance, if the nonlabeled infant, who was in reality a girl, exhibited some show of strength, the adults would guess that the infant was a boy and adjust their behavior accordingly. In this manipulation design, differential adult behavioral responses to the infants on the basis of the gender label can be seen as arising from attitudes and beliefs rather than existing infant gender differences (Stern & Karraker, 1989). Further support for the gender stereotype effect came from the work of Culp, Cook, and Housley (1983) who also found that both mothers and fathers of young children interact differently with unfamiliar infants dependent on assigned gender label and, in addition, that parents were unaware of their differential treatment. In a similar vein, there was an interaction with parent gender. Females responded more quickly if a baby was labeled female rather than male (Condry, Condry, & Pogatshnik, 1983), and both male and female adults use different communication styles with gender labeled infants (Pomerleau, Malcuit, Turgeon, & Cossette, 1997). The consistent finding that adults behave differently toward baby boys and baby girls based on attitudes and stereotypes is an important step in unraveling a reciprocal socialization process. Adult gender attitudes impact their interactional behavior in a self-fulfilling fashion, through eliciting and reinforcing behavior from the infant that serves to confirm the adult’s initial expectations (Stern & Karraker, 1989). Investigations of a prematurity stereotype. An area of study that has followed a similar trajectory as the gender labeling investigations involves attempts to understand the impact of an infant being labeled premature on subsequent adult behavior. Despite evidence that actual observable early differences in premature and full-term infants decline over time, there is a tendency of some mothers to continue to interact differently with premature infants (Barnard, Bee, & Hammond, 1984). Stern and Hildebrandt (1984) showed adults video footage of an infant who was labeled as either being full-term or premature. They found that unfamiliar infants who were labeled as premature were rated more negatively by college students and mothers than were infants A. J. Sameroff and M. J. MacKenzie labeled as full term. The next logical step was to determine if these adult stereotypes and attitudes toward premature children would impact their behavior during interactions. To achieve this, Stern and Hildebrandt (1986) introduced adults to an actual unfamiliar infant, either full term or premature. Once again, the prematurity label was found to trigger stereotypical beliefs; infants labeled premature were rated as smaller, less cute, and finer featured and were liked less than infants labeled full term. Moreover, the new study design also highlighted the impact of those adult expectations and perception on subsequent interaction patterns, as premature labeled infants were touched less and given a more immature toy to play with. To complete the sequence, Stern, Karraker, Sopko, and Norman (2000) found that the infants labeled as premature exhibited less positive emotion in their interactions with misinformed adults. Stern and colleagues have also been involved in studies extending these labeling/stereotype strategies to depression stereotypes, which have direct relevance for developmental psychopathology (Hart, Field, Stern, & Jones, 1997). Depressed and nondepressed fathers viewed videotapes of unfamiliar infants labeled as normal or depressed. Both groups of fathers rated infants labeled as normal higher on sociability, social behavior, and cognitive competence. A difference did occur when depressed fathers rated their own infants lower on social behavior, less cognitively competent, and more vulnerable than did nondepressed fathers. The elegance of these manipulation strategies is that the labeling of an unfamiliar infant or the use of a trained confederate provides an entry point into a process of circular causality, allowing for an elucidation of transactional pathways for processes that may otherwise be difficult to untangle. By simply observing a mother with her own infant, separating the impact of actual differences in child behavior from current or previous differential maternal beliefs and behaviors can be a daunting task. Through controlling the baseline characteristics of the child, either in regard to gender or prematurity, the experimental manipulation strategy makes it possible to see how the adult’s Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 88.99.165.207, on 13 Jul 2017 at 01:33:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579403000312 Transactional models expectations and perceptions influence and guide subsequent adult behavior. The impact of the adult’s actions on subsequent infant behavior is also discernable using this technique, providing the opportunity to see how these reciprocal processes play out over time. Experimental manipulations have revealed the operation of transactional processes in the laboratory with contrived relationships. A corollary effort is necessary to determine how parents and children influence each other in real relationships. What are the factors that lead parents to have stereotypes on the one hand and beliefs about their own and their child’s power on the other? Are there factors that arise from the parent’s previous interactions with the child, or are these the results of the parent’s own experience of being reared as a child? As Bugental and Shennum (1984) have demonstrated, it is relatively easy to get a school-age child to alter his or her behavior as a confederate in an experiment, but is it equally easy to get the child to change his or her behavior at home? Parents and children bring interactional histories to their present interactions, and these form the basis of being both unable to make quick changes in their behavior and being able to make quick changes in their attributions. As noted in the meta-analyses of the Pygmalian studies (Raudenbush, 1984), more experience with the actual behavior of the child should reduce the effect of labeling and stereotyping manipulations. Naturalistic observations and quasiexperimental designs Although true experimental designs and labeling/manipulation studies provide the most effective means for elucidating transactional processes, in most cases such research strategies are not available. In such cases it is sometimes possible to take advantage of natural “experiments” or a quasiexperimental design to gain insight into a developmental process (Cook & Campbell, 1979), although there are clear limitations in the extent to which these techniques can tease apart competing hypotheses involving reciprocal influences. In this section we will discuss four areas where researchers have grappled with these 627 methodological issues yet were able to make important contributions to our understanding of transactional developmental processes. The first focuses on the impact of maltreatment on child development through the comparison of maltreated and nonmaltreated children. The second involves attempts to elucidate the impact of early attachment relationships on later preschool social competence. Touching on issues developed previously in the section on the prematurity stereotype, the third area of research to be discussed addresses potential differences between preterm and full-term children. The final area focuses on the issue of grade retention and an examination of the effectiveness of failing and holding students back in school. Child maltreatment as a natural experiment. A substantial body of research aimed at increasing our understanding of the etiology and sequelae of maltreatment has grown out of a desire to protect both vulnerable children and our society from the harmful consequences associated with child abuse and neglect (Cicchetti, Toth, Bush, & Gillespie, 1988; Kotch, Browne, Dufort, Winsor, & Catellier, 1999). Maltreated children may in fact be viewed as a sort of natural experiment (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Shields, Ryan, & Cicchetti, 2001), which can be useful for examining questions involving the normative emergence of academic, emotional, and social competence. The extensive work of Cicchetti and colleagues at the preschool and summer day camp of the Mount Hope Family Center highlights the use of such naturalistic settings in order to observe children’s developing regulatory capacities and patterns of social interaction (Shields et al., 2001). Observations and study of children interacting in this day camp setting have allowed for comparisons of maltreated and nonmaltreated children on aspects of relationship representations, emotion understanding, and regulation, as well as interactive behavior and acceptance or rejection by peers and teachers. Shonk and Cicchetti (2001) were interested in elucidating the pathway from maltreatment to academic adjustment problems. They hypothesized and found that maltreated children would exhibit deficits in academic engagement, so- Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 88.99.165.207, on 13 Jul 2017 at 01:33:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579403000312 628 cial competencies, and ego resiliency and control, which would in turn negatively impact the children’s adjustment at school. The authors demonstrated that the pathway from maltreatment to academic adjustment problems was mediated by academic engagement, and the pathway from maltreatment to externalizing and internalizing behavior problems was mediated by social competencies and ego resiliency. Cicchetti and Lynch (1993) drew on the work of Bronfenbrenner (1979) and Sameroff and Chandler (1975) to propose a formal integration of an ecological–transactional model in an attempt to grapple with the combined influences of maltreatment and community violence on children’s developmental course. They laid out a transactional model in which the current ecological context impacts future child functioning and current child functioning influences the organization of the context (Lynch & Cicchetti, 1998). In such a process, they proposed that early problems in functioning and ecological risk at multiple levels of the ecology can serve to mutually contribute to continuity in the adversity facing the child. This view is in keeping with the stability found in adversity as at-risk children move from one context to another through development (Sameroff, Seifer, & Bartko, 1997). Lynch and Cicchetti (1998) demonstrated one direction of a transaction between child and context, such that earlier contextual factors were predictive of later child functioning. Maltreatment, witnessing of violence in the community, and reported victimization by violence were all negatively associated with the children’s functioning 1 year later. Evidence was also found for effects in the second direction from child to context in that children’s earlier level of behavioral functioning was predictive of later exposure to community violence. A large body of research exists that supports a link between early parent–child attachment relationships and later social relationships outside the family, with the child’s representations of relationships and capacity for the regulation of emotions acting as mediators in the transactional pathway. Here, we confine our discussion of the role of representations to the special and extreme case of the A. J. Sameroff and M. J. MacKenzie maltreated child. A recent examination of these processes comparing the representations of maltreated and nonmaltreated children in a preschool setting found that the narratives of the maltreated children contained more negative maternal and self-representations than those of the nonmaltreated children (Toth, Cicchetti, Macfie, & Emde, 1997). Despite the inability to conclusively determine if these differential representations arose as a result of the maltreatment or if they preexisted in the child and contributed to the maltreatment, there was evidence that the negative representations of maltreated children did go on to impact their interactive behavior. The maltreated children were observed to be more controlling and less responsive with the examiners during the administration of the instruments. Shields et al. (2001) provided further evidence to support the finding of differential representations of caregivers by maltreated children. In this analysis, however, the authors did pursue the next step and examined whether representations of caregivers are carried forward to influence later child behavior and impact developing peer relationships. Maladaptive representations were predictive of rejection by peers in a pathway mediated by emotion dysregulation and aggression. In contrast, the positive and coherent representations characteristic of nonmaltreated children were associated with more prosocial interactive behavior and peer preference. Peers were found to respond to maltreated children’s dysregulated behavior by avoiding, withdrawing from, or actively rejecting and victimizing them. Shields and colleagues reported being discouraged by how quickly the maltreated children were disliked upon entering a new social group. Infant–caregiver attachment and emerging social competence. A central tenet of attachment theory is that an infant’s secure relationship with the primary caregiver sets the stage for healthy emotional development and subsequent relationships outside of the family context (Bowlby, 1969, 1973, 1980; Bretherton, 1990). The transactional linkages in attachment theory begin with caregiver behavior that establishes the quality of the attachment representation, which in turn affects the quality of Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 88.99.165.207, on 13 Jul 2017 at 01:33:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579403000312 Transactional models the child’s later social interactions. There is an extensive literature establishing a link between quality of child–caregiver attachment and later social competence (Kerns, Klepac, & Cole, 1996; Lamb & Nash, 1989), but there have been fewer efforts to clearly elucidate the pathway whereby aspects of the early child–caregiver relationship are internalized and carried forward impacting development in broader social settings. One such effort was the work of Sroufe (1983), who, by capitalizing on the opportunity presented by a laboratory preschool sample of children from an ongoing project of mothers and their children, explored the importance of a secure attachment to later competence and adaptation. A detailed study of preschool children who had been classified as having secure, avoidant, and resistant attachment patterns during infancy allowed for an examination of aggression, prosocial behavior, status with peers, and dependency. The children who were securely attached as infants had greater self-esteem, exhibited fewer problem behaviors, and were more ego resilient, independent, compliant, empathic, and socially competent. Although the Sroufe (1983) study did not include an explicit analysis of the impact of children with different attachment working models on subsequent teacher responses, some of the teacher results do point to such transactional influences. Teachers were asked to provide one-phrase descriptions of the children, which ranged from “Ideal kid, good looking, OK. Well-coordinated, agile, competent . . . ” for a secure child to “Mean to other children, kept things which didn’t belong to her. The most dishonest preschooler I have ever met . . . ” for a child classified as avoidant. In fact, whenever there was a situation in the classroom that the teacher was angered enough to want to isolate a child, the child was an avoidant group baby, which Sroufe suggests is clear evidence that children elicit differential reactions from teachers that is dependent on their attachment status. In a follow-up report, resistant infants were rated by observers to be less confident and assertive and have poorer social skills than securely attached infants (Erickson, Sroufe, & Egeland, 1985). Avoidant children were found to be more dependent on their 629 teachers; to exhibit poorer social skills; to be less compliant with their teachers’ instructions; and to exhibit more negative emotions, including whining and pouting. These two studies provided strong evidence that aspects of the parent–child relationships are internalized and carried forward by the child into other settings. Comparing preterm and full-term development. As we discussed earlier, there is great difficulty inherent in disentangling bidirectional influences in naturalistic observations of ongoing parent–child relationships, but comparisons of categories that are independent of parent behavior, such as preterm and full-term infants, can provide some insight into transactional processes. In an example of such a research endeavor preterm and full-term infants were observed during dyadic feeding interactions at 4 and 8 months of age and during a teaching task with their mothers at 4, 8, and 24 months of age (Barnard et al., 1984). True differences existed in infant behavior at 4 months of age, with preterm infants exhibiting lower levels of responsiveness and involvement than the comparison full-term infants. Concurrent differences in maternal behavior were also found at 4 months, with mothers of preterm infants showing higher levels of stimulation compared to mothers of full-term infants. By 8 months of age there were no longer differences in the task involvement of preterm and full-term infants, yet the differential maternal behavior remained. These results extend the prematurity stereotype findings into more natural settings, because even though true child differences have largely diminished by 8 months, differences remained in maternal behavior. In fact, differential maternal behavior was found to persist at least until the 24-month assessment, at which the mothers of preterm infants exhibited fewer positive messages during teaching and reported lower levels of involvement with their children in daily activities. These parental continuities, independent of actual preterm child behavior, are similar to behavioral continuities in parents of shy children discussed earlier (Rubin et al., 1999). In another line of study, Poehlman and Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 88.99.165.207, on 13 Jul 2017 at 01:33:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579403000312 630 Fiese (2001) examined how maternal and infant vulnerabilities interacted to contribute to attachment quality. They compared preterm and full-term infants on measures of maternal depression, infant health characteristics, and attachment security at 1 year postterm. The key finding of this study was that the relation between maternal depressive symptoms and attachment security was moderated by preterm birth status. For full-term infants there was no association between maternal depression and attachment security, yet for preterm infants such an association emerges. Poehlman and Fiese (2001) concluded that characteristics of both the mother and infant contribute in a reciprocal manner to the quality of the dyadic relationship. In order to effectively meet the socialization goal of teaching infants how to appropriately modulate their emotions, the caregiver must adapt to the capacities of the child. An unresponsive infant with some sort of anomaly would make it more difficult for a caregiver to adopt an effective socialization strategy. Malatesta, Grigoryev, Lamb, Albin, and Culver (1986) compared the interactive behavior of mothers of normal infant with mothers of preterm infants in face to face interaction with their mothers. Preterm infants were found to spend less of their face to face interaction involved in eye contact with their mothers and express more negative emotion, which may account at least in part for the failure of mothers of preterm infants to match their infants’ expressions of surprise and sadness. In contrast, the full-term mothers exhibited significantly more matching of infant facial expressions. As added evidence for the effect of differential infant expressive behavior on maternal responses, there were minimal birth-status effects when considered independently of the actual infant interactive behavior. Combining the results of experimental manipulations in prematurity labeling studies and observations of real interactions provides corroborative evidence of differential maternal behavioral responses to differences in full-term and preterm infant behavior. Grade retention. The previous examples of naturalistic research opportunities focused on indi- A. J. Sameroff and M. J. MacKenzie vidual relationship level processes. This fourth example is focused on the institutional level process of grade retention in the educational setting to explore the adverse effects of social categories and system processes. The decades old debate between advocates of social promotion on one side and grade retention on the other, combined with the tremendous financial costs of keeping children in school longer as associated with retention, led Jimerson (1999) to utilize the data from a 21-year prospective longitudinal study in order to develop a more complete picture of the late adolescent outcomes associated with early grade retention. When comparisons were made among three groups, a group of students that were retained, a comparison group of low-achieving students that were nevertheless promoted, and a higher achieving control group, the retained students had a greater likelihood of poorer educational and employment outcomes during late adolescence. In contrast, the group of low-achieving students that was promoted was comparable to the control group in later employment outcomes. The author underscored the importance of considering the effects of grade retention using a transactional framework, highlighting the conspiring nature of the structural level factors that maintained a particular positive or negative trajectory once it was established. Jimerson concludes that grade retention leads directly to the later poor outcomes as the result of a transactional process because of the lack of prior achievement differences between the retained and promoted group. Intervention studies as a window into transactional processes The ultimate goal of our concern with developmental psychopathology is to improve the lives of individuals at risk for mental health problems. But intervening also informs more basic understanding of developmental processes as captured by Dearborn’s maxim, “Bronfenbrenner, if you want to understand something, try to change it” (Bronfenbrenner, 1979, p. 37). More generally, there is a great need to capitalize on the potential for research on prevention and intervention strategies to inform developmental theory. Nonexperimental approaches, Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 88.99.165.207, on 13 Jul 2017 at 01:33:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579403000312 Transactional models however, can only point to associations between risks and outcomes and suggest potential pathways, whereas intervention designs offer the ability to unravel the causal connections underlying both psychopathological and normative outcomes (Cicchetti & Hinshaw, 2002a; Cowan & Cowan, 2002). In nonexperimental research the problem of the unknown third variable is an important consideration. For example, data associating child maltreatment with later bad interactions with teachers and peers in the school environment does not allow us to conclude a causal relationship because there is the possibility that some characteristic of the child caused both the maltreatment and later social adjustment difficulties. Randomized intervention designs afford researchers the opportunity not only to determine the effectiveness of their particular program but also to control for alternative interpretations by more fully testing causal theoretical models (Conduct Problems Prevention Research Group [CPPRG], 2002). An example of such an approach comes from the Fast Track prevention trial, a comprehensive program aimed at preventing the early onset of conduct problems in children. Kindergarten aged children were rated by both teachers and parents, and those deemed to be at high risk for early conduct problems were randomly assigned to treatment or control conditions. The treatment group receives an array of services aimed at the areas of parenting, school success, and social cognitions. The program involves parent training, home visitation, social and social–cognitive skills training, academic tutoring, and teacher consultation (CPPRG, 2002). In addition to demonstrating the effectiveness of the Fast Track program at limiting parenting problems, referral for special education, and aggressive behavior, the randomized nature of this prevention design has also allowed the researchers to begin to unravel and test the mediational pathway hypothesized by their theoretical model. They proposed and found that the intervention on proximal targets (e.g., harsh parental discipline style and child attributions) mediated the effect on more distal child behavioral outcomes (CPPRG, 2002). A practical test of the transactional model 631 is whether or not it informs preventive intervention programs. The study of the Fast Track program highlights the valuable opportunity that developments in prevention science offer for breaking into reciprocal processes and testing and elucidating transactional models of development as they apply to both typical and atypical populations. Sameroff and Fiese (2000; Sameroff, 1987) proposed a transactional model of intervention that conceptually separated the eliciting effect of the child, the parent’s interpretation of the elicitation, and the parent’s response. Their model was described in terms of three Rs—remediation, redefinition, and reeducation—directed at the three parts of the system. Although the three targets are different aspects of a dynamic transactional system, most interventions will spill over into more than one category. Changes in the child through remediation can change the way parents perceive their children producing a redefinition. Redefining a child for the parents can change the way they will interact with them as if they had been reeducated. Reeducation to change parents’ interactive behavior can produce consequences that will change the parents’ attributions, again resulting in a redefinition. These intervention strategies are another example of the need to use mechanistic approaches, not only to produce a structural model for testing hypotheses, but also to produce a practical model to direct change agents at available nodal points in an ongoing multivariate dynamic system. Remediation. Interventions directed at the infant, remediation, are usually interpreted as directly effecting outcomes through personal changes. In a transactional system linkages to later behavior are seen as mediated or moderated by responses of parents. In this light, changing the child is only linked to later behavior if it changes intervening parental attributions and behavior. One example of a remediation strategy is to medicate children to change their behavior to better fit the social expectations and competencies of parents and teachers, as in the case of active children (Barkley, 1990). A linear interpretation of the poor psychological outcomes of malnourished children was Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 88.99.165.207, on 13 Jul 2017 at 01:33:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579403000312 632 that cell growth in the brain was altered (Stein & Susser, 1985). A transactional interpretation is that parental response mediated the effect. To examine how familial interactions may be influenced by nutritional status, Barrett, Radke–Yarrow, and Klein (1982) compared a group of children who had received caloric supplementation with a group who did not. The infants who received the nutritional supplements demonstrated greater social responsiveness, more expression of affect, greater interest in the environment, and higher activity at school age. Nutritional supplements increased the infants’ energy level, enabling the nourished infants to participate more fully in social interactions, giving clearer cues about their condition and eliciting a wide range of behaviors from their parents, including feeding. Similarly, placing very low birthweight infants in a stimulation program that increased their wakefulness and responsivity also increased the frequency of parent visits to the nursery, providing more opportunities for socializing experiences (Rosenfield, 1980). In another example of an intervention focused at changing the child, Zeskind and Ramey (1978) intervened with fetal malnutrition in high-risk families. At 3 months of age, in both the control and intervention groups, the infants who experienced fetal malnourishment had lower Bayley Mental Development Index scores (MDI) than those who were not fetally malnourished. By 18 months of age, however, the gap in MDI scores between the groups had disappeared for a day-care group but not for a no-treatment control group. Zeskind and Ramey (1978) also found that these child changes, in turn, changed the quality of the child–caregiver relationship. At 6 months of age, malnourished and nonmalnourished children in both the control and day-care conditions experienced similar amounts of maternal involvement; but by 18 months of age, the malnourished children in the no-treatment control condition had mothers that were significantly less involved than the other mothers. Intervening with the child led to differences not only in the child, but also in the mother–child relationship. Redefinition. Changing parent attributions (redefinition) is a strategy that does not require A. J. Sameroff and M. J. MacKenzie change in the infant. This is especially important when the infant cannot easily be changed, as in the case of biological anomalies such as preterm birth or developmental disabilities or individual differences such as difficult temperaments. However, even children without obvious deviancies can be problems for parents who frame them negatively and then engage in nonresponsive or negative interactions ranging into maltreatment. The transactional aspect is primarily important in changing the parent’s interpretative frame. A redefinition intervention was designed to address infant feeding problems (Benoit, Madigan, Lecce, Shea, & Goldberg, 2001). Mother– infant dyads that were having feeding problems were assigned either to a feeding-focused intervention, which trained mothers in appropriate feeding techniques, or a play-focused group, which received a slightly modified version of a videotaped feedback intervention, termed Interaction Guidance (McDonough, 1993). During the feedback session, parent– infant interactions were reframed to highlight infant responsiveness to different aspects of parent behavior. The Interaction Guidance group exhibited a significant decrease in atypical behaviors and disrupted communication during interactions. In contrast, there was no change in the feeding-focused skill training group. This suggests that feeding problems are not simply a feeding skills issue; instead, they reflect a disturbance in the relationship, which can be effectively dealt with through redefining the mother’s perceptions and beliefs. Maltreatment is another area where linear explanatory models are common; deviant parents engage in deviant child rearing. A transactional perspective would focus on the parents’ inappropriate interpretations of children’s behavior. With this as the target, an intervention tested the capacity of a brief cognitive component of a home visitation program to prevent later child maltreatment by high-risk parents (Bugental et al., 2002). Building on previous work by their group on attributions, Bugental and colleagues developed a program focused on the caregivers’ attitudes and beliefs about the child in an attempt to shift the way in which parents were interpreting caregiving Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 88.99.165.207, on 13 Jul 2017 at 01:33:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579403000312 Transactional models problems before they escalated to an abusive situation. Strong support was found for the cognitive reframing program. Mothers in the cognitive program exhibited lower levels of harsh parenting than did mothers in other groups. The percentage of mothers who were abusive during the first year was only 4% in the cognitive home visitation group as compared to 26% in a no-intervention control group and 23% in a home visitation condition without a cognitive component. The Bugental et al. (2002) study is another example where positive engagement may be facilitated through refocusing the parent on other more acceptable attributes of the child and reframing his or her interpretation of caregiving problems. Reeducation. Efforts aimed at reeducation do not rely on transactional effects, although they may produce them. The focus is on the end of a transactional chain where the child can be providing normative eliciting behavior to the parents, the parents’ attributions can be positive, but they do not have an adaptive repertoire of interactive behaviors in terms of either sensitivity or skills. Again, the contrast is with a linear model in which early problems in the child are directly related to later problems in the child as in the case of low birthweight infants. The majority of reeducation efforts are directed toward the family or individual parent and serve to provide information about specific caregiving skills. The Infant Health and Development Program (IHDP; 1990) was one such reeducation intervention aimed at enhancing the development of low birthweight premature infants. The IHDP was a multisite clinical trial that combined family and home-based educational interventions with child-focused center interventions. For the purposes of this illustration, we will limit our discussion to the home-based educational component. The families enrolled in the program received interventions over a period of 3 years, which provided parents with information on child development, instruction in the use of age-appropriate games, and family support for identified problems. Intervention effects improved cognitive development and reduced reports of child behavior problems 2 and 3 years after the intervention 633 (Brooks–Gunn, Klebanow, Liaw, & Spiker, 1993). Intervention effects also improved the quality of maternal assistance, the child’s persistence and enthusiasm, and dyadic mutuality in a laboratory setting (Spiker, Ferguson, & Brooks–Gunn, 1993). In contrast to large center-based reeducation interventions are interventions more tailored to meet the needs of individual families. McDonough’s (1993, 2000) Interaction Guidance gives feedback to parents while viewing videotapes of family interactions to increase positive family interactions. The feedback portion of the session serves to identify interactive behaviors that are reinforcing to the parents as well as patterns of interaction that lead to less enjoyable exchanges. In an interesting effort to contrast a primarily redefinition intervention (psychodynamic therapy for the mother) with a primarily reeducation therapy (Interaction Guidance) both were found to have similar effects in improving outcomes for children referred to a psychiatric clinic (Cramer et al., 1990). The psychotherapy approach succeeded in improving mothers’ perceptions but also subsequent interactions with their infants and the Interaction Guidance approach changed interactions but also improved mothers’ subsequent perceptions of their infants. Another effort to both inform clinical knowledge and provide insight into the direction of socialization effects, as outlined above, was explicitly explored by LaFreniere and Capuano (1997) in order to reduce disturbances in the child–caregiver relationships for young children with anxious–withdrawn behavior. Their home visit based intervention for preschool children consisted of 20 sessions spread out over a 6-month period, which sought to educate the caregiver on his or her child’s developmental needs and parenting issues. Starting with parent education and skills training, in later sessions they moved to viewing videotapes of mother–child interactions and modifying problem behavior. The mothers in the treatment group exhibited significant changes in their exertion of appropriate control and became less intrusive with their children. Their children ended up showing higher levels of cooperation and enthusiasm and teachers rated Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 88.99.165.207, on 13 Jul 2017 at 01:33:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579403000312 634 them as more socially competent than control children. The transactional nature of this prevention program was illustrated by the changes in child behavior, as assessed in the school, resulting from an intervention aimed at improving mother–child relationship processes. Analyses of all three R’s were combined in an intervention to improve developmental outcomes for motorically impaired preschool children. Woolfson (1999) found this useful because he found redefinition to be as important in outcomes as the more traditional use of child remediation and parent reeducation strategies. Prevention and intervention science (Coie, Miller–Johnson, & Bagwell, 2000; Coie et al., 1993) have moved toward more and more explicit models for their efforts (Price, 1983). From early experiments where only outcome was assessed, current efforts are required to specify and measure changes at every level of the system. Analytically, this means a move from linear mediation models to nonlinear moderation models where many factors are interacting in producing the expected outcomes. Beginning with assessments of whether interveners are delivering program components to the parents, moving to assessments of whether the parents have been changed by the intervention, and only then testing to see if the children had different outcomes will bring to light more and more evidence for the effectiveness of interventions conceptualized transactionally. Because it has been so difficult to demonstrate large positive effects of interventions with children, it should be possible with more complex studies to determine if the failures are in the delivery and fidelity of interventions, the acceptance of the intervention by parents or teachers, or their appropriateness for one kind of child or another. Future Directions The transactional model was originally described to emphasize the dynamic relation between child and context across time with particular relevance to developmental outcomes in the child (Sameroff & Chandler, 1975). Although dynamic reciprocal interchanges were clear parts of the model, for most readers the imparted message was a need to broaden an A. J. Sameroff and M. J. MacKenzie exclusive focus on continuities and discontinuities in the child as explanations of developmental outcomes to include the continuities and discontinuities in the social context as well. The future agenda should be devoted to reintegrating these two aspects. The first step is to give full recognition to all of the possible arrows in the structural model (Sigel & Parke, 1987). There are stabilities in all parts of the system; there are continuities in the child, in the child’s ecological settings, and in the dyadic interactions between the child and significant others in these settings. Each of these is more or less open to change. Given these continuities, a transactional analysis would be to discover the conditions under which discontinuities occur or where a change in one partner has the opportunity to reorganize the behavior in the other. Such analyses would provide opportunities and also set limits for intervention efforts to improve developmental success. There must also be a schedule of assessments frequent enough to identify the developmental periods when child and context are more or less open to each other and consequently most likely to change. Under real life circumstances, the best we can do is description. Attributing causation to any element of the system always begs the question of the history of that element. Is difficult temperament during infancy an expression of biological tendencies or the result of prior parenting? Is inept caregiving an expression of parent inadequacy or a reaction to prior experience with the child? As the child grows these influences become more and more difficult to untangle—the direction of effects dilemma. Sameroff and Peck (2001) were surprised to find that parental efforts at proactive prevention of behavioral and educational problems in their adolescent children were correlated with worse outcomes. Their interpretation was that by adolescence successful parents only engage in these efforts if their children still had problems. For the children who are doing well, the parents were less concerned. Bidirectional influences are well documented in experimental research on child–adult interactions as exemplified by the work of Bugental (1987). That direction of effects make a difference in the real world should be docu- Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 88.99.165.207, on 13 Jul 2017 at 01:33:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579403000312 Transactional models mented in the work of interventionists working with families. A standard intervention strategy is to change some aspect of the parent and compare the treatment and no-treatment group for differences in child outcomes (e.g., Bakermans–Kranenburg, van IJzendoorn, & Juffer, in press). Unless there was also an assessment of the changed behavior of the targeted parent there would be no possibility of understanding the process involved. This is part of a more general critique of intervention efforts with children and adolescents: the focus is too centered on the individual level of analysis (Trickett, 1997), ignoring the proximal processes that would lead to the more distal child outcomes (Kellam & Van Horn, 1997). Multilevel analyses We have focused this article on examining the evidence for transactions between parents and children, but we recognize that children and their parents are involved in many ecological settings that are also changing and being changed by their participants. Explaining developmental outcomes will require attention to these multiple sources of influence as well as the parent–child dyad. This issue is clearest in intervention studies where the interveners are part of the system, but it is equally true of all studies beyond infancy where the parent– child relationship begins to pale in the face of peer and school involvements that occupy more of the youth’s time. An example of such a multilevel investigation is a mediation study of the effect of economic problems on adjustment in school-aged children (Conger et al., 2002). The chain of influence began with economic pressure, which led to emotional distress in caregivers, which in turn was associated with disrupted parenting practices predicting more internalizing and externalizing problems in the children. In a similar vein, Hetherington, Bridges, and Insabella (1998) identified five contributing factors in a review of the effects of marital transitions on children’s adjustment: family composition, individual vulnerability and stress, socioeconomic disadvantage, parental mental health, and disrupted family process. The au- 635 thors note the “fashionable” attempts to separate the contributions of child, parent, family, and social stress to child outcomes. These efforts have led to conflicting and futile controversies because different studies with different samples and different methods provide different explanations for child adjustment. Their solution is the use of a transactional model because they view the risks associated with marital transitions as linked, mediated, and moderated in complex ways. Moreover, they indict static, cross-sectional studies for giving misleading pictures of how the effects of risk and protective factors combine. Better statistics We can continue to proclaim that the theory should be complex enough to understand the phenomena being studied; but when one combines transactional, developmental, and ecological concerns, the complexity of design is daunting for most researchers. To the extent that statistical advances allow more methodological complexity, design complexity will increase. Regression analyses, structural equation modeling, and hierarchical linear regression analyses have been important additions to the researcher’s armamentarium. During the early years of the transactional model, there was always a disquieting murmur questioning the possibility of operationalizing such a model. With the publication of Baron and Kenny’s (1986) moderator–mediator paper a new “street light” was lit under which investigators could seek their “lost keys.” However, the ability to do such analyses at the click of an icon has also permitted the elimination of theory to guide such analyses. Researchers must be encouraged to specify the developmental model being tested, but therein lays the ultimate rub. The models will always be static representations of dynamic systems. To the extent one can find dynamic systems to model developmental processes, such as connectionist analyses, the most interesting processes remain hidden, with only the input and output specifiable. Richters (1997) cogently expanded on the differences between the open systems (von Bertalanffy, 1968) that characterize development and the closed sys- Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 88.99.165.207, on 13 Jul 2017 at 01:33:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579403000312 636 tems that characterize developmental research. Although he offers hope for improved research paradigms that can better approximate the reality of human experience, he and we are continually confronted with the implications of Godel’s (1992) proof that one cannot understand a system from the inside. Because the scientist and the object of science are within the same system, there will never be a complete understanding. The list of philosophical, physical, and mathematical conundrums is endless. A. J. Sameroff and M. J. 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