DEVELOPMENTAL
Naturalistic
REVIEW
6, 203-223
(1986)
Research
and
Study of Child
Ecological
Development
Thinking
in the
JAAN VALSINER
AND
LAURA BENIGNI
Different
kinds of ideas that are labeled “ecological”
have become popular
among child psychologists
in the recent years. The increasingly
Tpreading
use of
the term “ecological”
in contemporary
psychology
entails the hazard of inflating
the usefulness
of that concept by extending
its meaning
to wide domains
of research and thinking
without
a careful scrutiny
of rhe theoretical
implications
of
the term. An example
of such widening
of the meaning of “ecological”
in psychology
is the case where the term is often used as a synonym
for “naturalistic”
and attached
10 any empirical
study that takes place in some everyday
life context. This article is aimed at defining the “ecological
approach”
in the context of
the study of child-environment
relationships.
Such use of the term “ecological”
fits an open-systems
theoretical
framework
which is in principle
different
from
the closed-systems
(nonecological)
perspective
that has been dominant
in traditional child psychology.
The relevance
of culturally
constructed
meanings
that
operate in the child-environment
transaction
is discussed as an important
part of
the ecological
view of human development.
Empirical
research which is based on
the open systems view of the nature of child development
within culturally
structured meaningful
environments
constitutes
the core of the “ecological
approach”
in developmental
psychology,
irrespective
of whether
it is carried out in the field
or in a laboratory.
i’ 1986 Academic
PTC\\. Inc
In recent years, increase of interest in the ecological emphasis in the
study of child development
has been evident in the literature (Rronfenbrenner, 1977, 1979; Wilcox & Katz, 1981; Wohlwill,
1983). That increasing interest makes it necessary to conceptualize the ecological perspective so that it adequately represents issues of psychological
development. This is a complicated task, since psychology as a whole has been
nonecological in its theoretical emphasis ever since it separated from philosophy (Super & Harkness,
1981). Unless the conceptual issues of the
ecological approach in child development
research are analyzed extensively, empirical research that is proclaimed to be “ecological”
has all
The authors are grateful to Grover
Whitehurst
and two anonymous
editorial reviewers
fol
their thoughtful
and helpful comments
on an earlier version of this manuscript.
Requests for
reprints
should bc sent to Jaan Valsiner,
Department
of Psychology.
University
of North
Carolina,
David Hall 013A, Chapel Hill. NC 27514.
203
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VALSINER
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the chances of becoming another fashion that lacks theoretical innovation
behind its appealing label. The history of psychology has been rich in
such recurrent fashions (e.g., see Buss, 1978; Flanagan, 1981).
Interest in discussing issues of “ecological validity” seems to have disseminated in recent years to subfields of psychology where investigators
have traditionally
insisted upon the use of experimental methods in laboratory settings. Neisser (1982) has brought many of such contributions in
the area of memory research together under the same cover. Likewise,
Rogoff and Lave (1984) have provided examples of how everyday cognition can be studied. Calls for a transactional
approach in child psychology have also emphasized the relevance of looking at child-environment relationships (Sameroff, 1975, 1982). Research on perception and
action that has followed from Gibsonian traditions has also propagated
the need for a more ecological approach in psychology. Curiosity about
real-life psychological
phenomena also is emerging in other fields that
have been resistant to naturalistic observations. This has led to reevaluation of the conceptual side of psychologists’
activities. For example,
Bower (1981) has questioned the validity of separation of cognition from
emotions and motivation. An “experimental
purist” could consider such
an endeavour perhaps an act of “treachery” against the positivistic ideals
in psychology. However, when viewed from the perspective of adequacy
of psychological
thinking as it reflects reality, abandonment
of some
ideals that have been imported into psychology from other sciences may
open new alleys for constructing more realistic conceptual systems in our
discipline.
The goal of the present article is to contrast nonecological and ecological approaches to the study of child development. First, we analyze the
different meanings in which the term “ecological”
has appeared in
science. Second, we discuss the meaning of the concept of “development” in child psychology. We proceed then to point to the relationship
between a narrower use of the term “ecological”
in the context of developmental research and provide examples of empirical research that can
be called “ecological.”
since they explicity address the issue of the
open-systems nature of development. Finally, the role of cultural meaning
as the context of child development
is analyzed as the environment in
exchange with which the child develops. Defined along the lines of this
article, the terms “ecological”
no longer serves as a synonym to “naturalistic”-and
may thus survive the conceptual inflation that has been
endemic in psychology.
THE HISTORICAL
BACKGROUND
OF THE
ECOLOGICAL
PERSPECTIVE
The introduction
of different ecological perspectives into science has
been a direct outgrowth of the development of evolutionary theory. Al-
NATURALISTIC
RESEARCH
205
though Darwin’s analyses of natural phenomena in terms of their interdependence provide good examples of ecological thinking,
the term
“ecology”
itself was introduced in the 1870s by Ernst Haeckel, who defined it as the science of the “correlations
between all organisms living
together in one and the same locality and their adaptations to their surroundings” (Haeckel, 1896, p. 354). The linguistic roots of the term come
from the Greek word oikos which denotes household or living space,
Since the term was first introduced in the context of evolutionary biology, it is not surprising that it carried with it some related assumptions.
like an emphasis on competition
between organisms and the role of the
environment in the selection of “the fittest” of a species (Hawley, 1944:
Park, 1936). These assumptions were quite directly carried over to the
study of human ecology as that approach emerged from the web of sociology in the 1920s (see Hawley, 1968). This transfer of the term to human
societies brought its theoretically inappropriate sides out into the open.
The early ecological approach of biology and sociology amounted to little
more than a complex and structured form of environmental
determinism
of people’s actions (Alihan, 1938). For example, one of the early human
ecologists in sociology defined the discipline “as a study of the spatial
and temporal relations of human beings as affected by the selective, distributive, and accommodative
forces of the environment”
(McKenzie,
1924, p. 288). The historical aspect of human societies and environments
-their
development
through purposeful actions of the people-remained largely beyond the sphere of interest of the ecological approach
in sociology. Sociological human ecology progressed in the direction of
.s~nec*olog~---the study of correlations between the organisms engaged
with a given unit of environment.
Organisms were viewed from the perspective of their relationships
with the environment
as a population,
rather than from the perspective of their relationships as individuals. The
other branch of human ecology--crrtrrc,oloav,
the study of the individual
organism’s interaction with environment-was
rarely represented in the
ecological sociology movement of the 1920- 1930s (Hawley, 1968. p. 328).
This is not at all surprising, since the synecological perspective fits the
domain of sociology better than the autecological one.
The introduction of ecological ideas into psychology in the 1930s proceeded in the direction of autecological thinking. Both learning-theoretical and structural-psychological
perspectives made the individual’s relationships with the environment
into a central issue in psychology.
Brunswick went so far as to suggest long ago that these relationships be
used to replace the behavioristic fascination with “behavior”
as the primary topic in psychology:
In terms of reception
(i.e., perception
and thinking)
as well as of action.
psychologv
in terms of ob.jects would turn out to be a physical and biological
natural
science. being concerned
in particulu
with all kinds of fairly well-e\tabhshed
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VALSINER
AND BENIGN1
interruptable causal couplings between the classes of reactions on the one hand,
and the corresponding classes of releasing, or effected, “attained” types of (environmental) constants or events on the other. This-rather
thun the inrrinsic
properties of behavior
as such-seems
to me the primary
ropic of psychology,
which
thus appears
to be dejked
by a formal
criterion,
as a certain
type of objecti\,e
correlution.
(Brunswick, 1938, p. 236)
The ecological emphasis emerged in psychology in conjunction with
the development of Gestalt psychology, and in sequel to the experience
of World War I (Lewin, 1917). Investigators who discussed organismenvironment relationships arrived at different conceptualizations
of those
relationships. Some (e.g., Brunswick, 1943, 1955) separated the structure
of the environment
from that of the organism, and then proceeded to
study the correlational/probabilistic
coupling of the two. Others (e.g.,
Koffka, 1935; Lewin, 1933, 1939, 1943) refrained from the initial separation of the organism and the environment and attempted to analyze the
person-environment
relationships as those unfold in the course of action. Koffka’s theoretical heritage has been the basis for the emergence
of the branch of ecological psychology as a separate subdiscipline since
the 1960s (Gibson, 1961, 1977, 1979; Shaw, Turvey, & Mace, 1982;
Soraci, 1982). On the side of learning-theoretical
thinking, the dependence of the learning process on environmental conditions made it necessary to bear these conditions in mind when learning was studied (Kantor,
1933; Skinner, 1953) and when child development was explained from an
operant learning perspective (e.g., Bijou & Baer, 1961, 1965, 1978). Last
but not least, the emergence of the subfield of environmental psychology
(Proshansky, 1976; Proshansky, Ittelson, & Rivlin, 1970) paved the way
to increased interest in the use of the term “ecological”
in psychology.
That interest has found its proponents in child psychology, among other
domains.
CHILD PSYCHOLOGY
AND ECOLOGICAL
THINKING
Children can be studied in various settings, some of which are set up
specifically for the purposes of the study. Likewise, child psychologists
may make good use of situations in which they can observe psychological
phenomena as those occur in their natural settings. The history of child
psychology cannot boast of frequent efforts to study children’s development in their actual life environments.
The need for more naturalistic
studies has been noted by a few researchers. For instance, Barker and
Wright (1949, p. 131) claimed that “We cannot find a detailed history of
any child from the time he awoke one morning until he went to sleep that
night, ’ ’ and proceeded to study the actual life experiences of children to
fill the gap in these data (Barker & Wright, 1951). Their studies in child
psychology in the 1950s led to greater appreciation
of observational
methods in the discipline (Wright, 1960).
NATURALISTIC
RESEARCH
207
Calls for empirical studies in real-life environmental
conditions may be
the major reason why in the everyday discourse of child psychologists
the term “ecological”
often is used as referring to naturalistic (as opposed to laboratory) research. However, the conceptual issues of what
constitutes the “ecological approach” that the studies of children in their
everyday environments could have made the object of psychologists’ scientific creativity, remained largely unattended. Empirical research has
concentrated on accurate and extensive description of different aspects
of children’s environments (e.g., Caldwell, 1969). At the same time, the
theoretically very complicated issue of horr, the child relates to these environments has largely remained without attention. That oversight, in our
opinion, is connected with the conceptual confusion between developmental and nondevelopmental
issues in child psychology.
Status Quo Versus
Development:
Two Sides of a
Psychological
Phenomena
The conceptual system of developmental
psychology is in a particularly complicated state. Not only is it haunted by the epistemological
difficulty in its definition of the “ecological approach,” but the discipline
also has difficulties conceptualizing
its key concept-development-as
well (Benigni & Valsiner, 1985; Cairns & Valsiner, 1982). Therefore, an
attempt to construct an “ecological developmental
psychology” may be
an endeavour with considerable
complications
(Bronfenbrenner
&
Crouter, 1983). There are different reasons for these complications.
Child
psychology has largely been built on the foundation of the assumptions
that occidental cultures have been influenced by in the course of the past
century. Psychology’s axioms have usually been left implicit in the minds
of investigators (see Kessen, 1979). Beyond the cultural myopia of psychology, part of these complications
can be attributed to the limits that
the language which we use sets for us, whenever we try to think or talk
about “development”
and “ecological”
ways of approaching it. Even
our everyday language is well adapted to the capturing of static. ontological aspects of the world. Efforts to describe change and development
with the help of our ordinary language are often complicated by the lack
of descriptive and explanatory concepts in the language that would refer
to the dynamic side of the world. Last (but not least), the traditions of
borrowing the scientitic method from physics in general, and from classical mechanics in particular, have made it difficult to capture the development per se. Psychology as a scientific discipline has historically been
nonecological and ahistorical (Castelfranchi & Parisi, 1976), which inevitably has guided psychologists’
thinking in directions opposite to the
conceptualization
of ecological developmental
psychology.
The overwhelming majority of empirical research efforts in child psy-
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VALSINER
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chology have been conducted with the purpose of revealing the static
“true nature” of the phenomena under study. In that respect, a study of
infants or children is often nondevelopmental-the
children are studied
as they are, rather than as they change and develop. A study of child
psychology becomes developmental
only if the theoretical emphasis is
shifted from addressing issues of “being” to the study of “becoming.”
Instead of asking research questions about what children at different ages
“are like,” the task of explaining hog children move from one state of
“being”
into another constitutes the core of the developmental
approach. For example, consider the following question: “do 6-month-olds
have intentionality?”
Any answer to that question is necessarily nondevelopmental, since the question itself is aimed at revealing a present state
(“being”) of the 6-month-olds’
cognitive sphere. It does not pertain to
the question of “becoming.”
In contrast, it is possible to ask a developmental question: “how do infants progress through their first year of life
from a state without intentionality
to a state where intentionality
is
present?” This basic difference between research approaches within
child psychology is often not clarified by investigators who tend to use
the term “developmental”
very often in a wide sense, which comes close
to being synonymous with “child”
psychology. For example, Piaget’s
description of stages in children’s cognitive development is often referred
to as “Piaget’s developmenfal
theory,” whereas in reality it involves the
organization of the developmental
phenomena into a series of descriptive
homogeneous classes (stages) through which the development proceeds
(cf. Brainerd, 1978; Kaye, 1982). Piaget, of course, has his developmental
theory-the
theory of equilibration-which
is used to explain the developmental process itself (Piaget, 1977). Piaget’s description of stages is a
nondevelopmental
account of qualitative
similarity
classes arranged
along the age axis, whereas his equilibration
theory is a developmental
explanation of how children construct their own cognitive future through
the interdependence
of assimilation
and accommodation
(KarmiloffSmith, 1978; Neimark, 1978; Olson, 1978).
It should be emphasized that both nondevelopmental
and developmental approaches in psychology have their place in the improvement of
the knowledge base of the discipline. A failure to distinguish these approaches from one another, however, is likely to lead an investigator to
empirical pursuits based on conceptual confusion. As a result, a researcher may claim that she/he has studied development when actually
only a static view of the phenomenon at some stage of development was
obtained. This leads to the importance of the process/outcome distinction
in the study of child development.
The Distinction
of Developmental
The nondevelopmental
Processes and Their Outcomes
emphasis in psychology
deals with analysis of
NATURALISTIC
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209
outcomes of psychological processes. It is complicated to make inferences from outcomes to the processes that generate those outcomes.
Therefore, the value of a static, outcome-based approach in psychology
for the goal of understanding the nature of developmental
processes is
limited. That limitation was clear to many leading figures in psychology,
who in the past have called for the study of psychological
processes
(Lewin, 1933, Vygotsky, 19.56, 1960: Werner, 1937, 1957).
The developmental
perspective entails an organismic view of the
world. It is closely related to the biological sciences, which take an interest in the processes of change in the organic world. Any effort to study
phenomena which change. especially within a discipline that makes the
change into the object of its study, has to deal with the complex problem
of explaining the emergence of nr\z’ forms of phenomena. In biological
sciences at large, the emergence of novel phenomena is usually explained
post fuctlrm. For example, the evolutionary
theory explains the processes by which new species huve evolved, without much success in prediction of novel developments in the species in the future (Striven, 1959).
Compared with evolutionary theory, developmental
psychology is in an
even more complicated situation in respect to explanation and prediction.
Instead of an emphasis on post fnctum explanation, developmental
researchers try to explain how the present state of a child’s psychological
processes will change and become another state in the future. Whereas
evolutionary
explanations are historical in their scope, explanatory efforts in developmental
psychology oftentimes need both past- and futureoriented perspectives to be applied to its phenomena. The key question
for developmental
psychology is how to explain the emergence of qualitatively new forms of phenomena in children’s acting and thinking. The
ways in which issues of prediction have been conceptualized
in psychology provide a paradoxical background for efforts to reach that goal.
Pmradoxes of Prediction
The task of predicting developmental outcomes is particularly complicated because of the high flexibility in the life courses of developing children. Nevertheless, the goal of predicting developmental outcomes continues to be pursued in child psychology. What child psychologists have
often attempted to do is to predict the recurrence of the past in the future
(cf. criticism by McCall, 1977). Such efforts, however, are nondevelopmental in their nature-the
ideally “predictable”
situations would be the
recurrence of an old phenomenon in the course of development. Recurrence of previously present phenomena is not equal to development.
Such predictable recurrence precludes the emergence of qualitatively
novel phenomena, the appearance of which cannot be predicted from the
mere occurrence of some other phenomena before.
Two examples may help to clarify the difference between outcome-ori-
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ented and process-oriented
approaches to child development.
First,
imagine that an investigator
studies the correlational
relationship
between certain behavioral aspects of newborns’ and toddlers’ actions. A
sample of newborns participates in the study, and is followed longitudinally until they reach toddlerhood. If the investigator calculates correlation coefficients to characterize statistical relationships
between the
newborns’ and toddlers’ behavioral “measures” of some sort, the correlation coefficient is a measure of stability of the relative position of individual children within the sample from newborn age to toddlerhood. The
correlation coefficient is a nondevelopmental
result of a longitudinal investigation of the sumple of children. If it is sufficiently high to be statistically significant, then it is uniformative from the perspective of how children’s behavior develops, since the only aspect that it signifies is the
relative stability of the subjects’ standing within the sample. That
standing may either be preserved by similar developmental
courses of
individual children, or involves no development within each individual
child at all. In neither case is it possible to make inferences about development from the study. If, on the other hand, it is low and statistically
nonsignificant, it is impossible to infer much from it either from the static
or from the developmental perspective. Finally, such a correlation study
is essentially inferentially valid only if the investigator is interested in the
group (sample) of children, and in figuring out the stability within the
group over time. Any inference from group data to individual children,
or, in other terms, individual predictions based on group data are unwarranted on theoretical grounds (see Lamiell, 1982; Valsiner, 1986). Therefore, a longitudinal
study of newborns until they become toddlers, and
the correlation of earlier with later behavioral measures in the sample,
offers very little for either prediction or explanation, and is an illustration
of a case where developmental
processes that participate in individuals’
development are eliminated from the study in favor of behavioral outcomes studied within the sample over time.
The second example illustrates the developmental,
process-oriented,
approach to behavioral change from infancy to toddlerhood. An investigator who studies the same sample longitudinally,
and who is interested
in the process of behavioral development, can analyze the developmental
process directly on the basis of individual children’s relationships with
their environments.
The investigator starts with an assumption that certain developing skills-for
instance, creeping/crawling-make
it possible
for the infant to act in novel ways, or in novel environments.
For example, an infant who has mastered creeping can gain access to objects
that were previously unavailable to him/her. All children in the sample
may develop such novel motor skills that make new behavioral possibili-
NATURALISTIC
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ties available to them. The relative position of the individual children in
the sample may, but need not, remain stable over the first year (as in the
example above), but each of these children in their personal ontogenies
has gone through a sequence of emergence of qualitatively new behavioral phenomena. The latter example of direct analysis of the developmental processes is an example of the developmental approach to motor
behavior in infancy. Such process-oriented
approach was far more
common in child psychology in the 1930s than it is now, largely due to the
strong interest in motor development (Gesell & Thompson, 1929. 1934;
McGraw, 1941, 1943), but without an auxiliary emphasis on the environments within which the developing motor skills were intertwined in children’s lives.
SYNTHESIS
OF DEVELOPMENTAL
AND ECOLOGICAL
APPROACHES:
OPEN SYSTEMS
Up to now we have outlined two basic conceptual problems in contemporary child psychology-the
equating of “ecological”
with “naturalistic” in discourse about empircal research, and the frequent lack of differentiation of the developmental
and nondevelopmental
perspectives in
psychologists’ thinking. Now it is time to analyze the common roots of
these two conceptual
difficulties.
We claim that both conceptual
problems stem from the same root-u
\z!idespread lack of understanding
in psychology
that all psychological
phenomena result from the opensystems nature of organisms
that are interdependent
with their environments.
It is the open-systems nature of developmental phenomena that makes
their future course unpredictable in general, and dependent upon the organism-environment
relations at any given time in particular. All biological organisms are open systems. Different from the closed systems
(which exist independently
of their environments), the open systems depend on exchanges with their envirorzmcnts for their survival and development (cf. Bertalanffy, 1950, 1952, 1981). Only open systems are capable of developing toward more complex states of organization
(including qualitatively
novel ones), and the particular future forms of the
open systems are not predictable from their starting or intermediate
states of organization.
Given the open-systems nature of all developmental
phenomena in biology and psychology, the only theoretically conceivable way to explain
the processes of development is to study the ongoing exchange processes
between the developing organism and its environment. This is exactly the
domain for w’hich we suggest to reser\>r the term “ecological
appromch”
when applied to issues of child deizelopment. The axiom of the open-
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VALSINER
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systems nature of development leads to the necessity to study development ecologically, making the child-environment
relations the object of
the study.
ECOLOGICAL
AND NONECOLOGICAL
APPROACHES
DEVELOPMENTAL
SCIENCES
IN
The ecological and nonecological
approaches in developmental
research can be distinguished on the basis of two criteria. First, the ecological approach includes the contexts of the phenomenu in its sphere of
andysis, whereas the nonecological perspective excludes these contexts
as scientifically uninteresting, or as “noise” that obscures the “true nature” of the phenomena. Second, the ecological view makes the phenomenon-context
interaction process the object of the study, in contrast to
the nonecological viewpoint according to which the context may be considered to be important, but not studied directly as the phenomenon interacts with it. Inclusion of the organism-environment
transaction process in empirical research is necessary for considering a particular study
ecological in scope.
Examples
Example
of Ecological
1: An Observational
and Nonecological
Studies
Study of African Infancy
Consider the actions of a hypothetical investigator who studies infant
care in Africa, traveling around in different African countries and visiting
villages, where she/he performs participant observations on that issue.
Findings that result from that study are not automatically
“ecological”
despite the fact that the investigator studied the phenomenon in the most
naturalistic context using the least intrusive methods. A frequent conclusion that has resulted from research by quite a few cross-cultural investigators in Africa reads something like this: “African mothers are in extensive physical contact with their infants, they carry their babies on the
backs and nurse them on demand.” This generalization is nonecological
in its nature despite the fact that the observations were made in naturalistic settings. It excludes information about the contexts where the phenomenon is observed (e.g., what the mothers were doing when they were
carrying their infants; were the infants asleep or awake, under what conditions were the infants not carried by their mothers but by somebody
else, or nobody at all). Furthermore, this generalization is based on data
that from the beginning excluded the intrinsic relationship of the infantcarrying practices with the subsistence tasks that the mothers perform.
However, a simple description of the intricate variation that contextual
factors inflict upon the phenomenon is not sufficient for the “ecological”
approach. The interdependence of the phenomenon with its environment
has to be studied as a process. There exist many ways in which the or-
NATURALISTIC
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213
ganism-environment
transaction process can be analyzed (e.g., Blurton
Jones, 1983; Blurton Jones & Sibly, 1978; Woodson, Reader, Shepherd,
& Chamberlain,
1981). Continuing our example, the phenomenon of infant-carrying practices in Africa can be studied from the perspective of
under what conditions of the changing environment is the infant held in
positions other than close body contact, and under what circumstances
the proximal contact reappears.
Example 2: tntelligrnce
Testing
In contrast to ecological thinking in psychology, the nonecological approach extracts the phenomena from their contexts in ways that introduce irreversible separation between the two. The use of psychological
tests of intelligence or personality is a prime example of the widespread
tradition of nonecological thinking in psychology. These tests reduce the
psychological phenomena of intelligence and personality to some set of
outcomes of subjects’ actions (e.g., endorsement of options of response.
or the fact of providing “right” answers), separating them from the context of psychological processes that the subjects used to reach these outcomes. To explain the measured outcomes, investigators often use the
attribution of the cause(s) for them to the “mind” or “environment”
of
the subjects, without proceeding to study hm’ these causal agents actually bring about the outcomes (see Valsiner. 1984). In the psychometric
traditions in the study of children’s intelligence, the nondevelopmental
and nonecological nature of this kind of research is evident. Intelligence
test scores at different ages, even in the case of longitudinal
research
designs, do not explain in any way the process of the children’s cognitive
development.
The children’s intelligence test scores remain characteristics of outcomes of the work of psychological processes in the childenvironment
transaction. The children’s actual cognitive processes interact with the characteristics of the testing situation, as Piaget’s earlier
research and contemporary cognitive studies (Sternberg, 1984) have indicated.
Generalized Example
Following the more specific examples given above, we can proceed to
a more generalized contrast of the ecological and nonecological empirical
research.
The nonecological
paradigm separates the object of investigation (0)
from its environmental
context (C), and proceeds to study the former. If
the study is observational, only the “behavior”
of 0 in the course of the
study is recorded. If the study is experimental,
different aspects of the C
are picked by the investigator, turned into “independent
variables” (or
variables”),
using “index variables” for the function of “independent
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VALSINER
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and used in the experiment. In either case, the explanatory conceptual
system that is applied to the data includes attributions to unitary sources
of causality, rather than to an interrelated causal system that includes
both organismic and environmental
aspects in their original interdependence. A prime example of this practice is the widespread thinking in
terms of the analysis of variance in psychology, where different portions
of the variance are “accounted for” by different “effects” or their interactions. In this case, what is “accounted for” is variability in some outcome of some (usually unspecified) psychological processes that are assumed to mediate between the experimenter’s
preplanned manipulation
of independent variables and the outcomes (recorded under the name of
“dependent variables”). The “accounting for” proceeds by attribution of
the “share” in that outcome to some unitary sources of causality. Even
when “interaction”
of “effects” is talked about, it does not (and cannot)
include explicit information
of how these presumably
“interacting”
factors are related in reality. In other terms, research that studies children and their environments
simultaneously,
hut separately from each
other, perhaps arriving at the result that both children and environmental
factors “interact,”
remains nonecological in scope because it has eliminated the actual process qf such interaction from the empirical study by
the experimental
design which overlooks
the child-environment
interchange process. Starting from the post fuctum attribution of causality for
some outcome variance to some causal factors that are presumed
affected the production of these outcomes lacks an empirical
decisions about how (if at all) these factors actually did interact
in the given outcome.
In contrast, an ecological approach as applied to empirical
prescribes
the study of the actual processes
tions that are investigated
as they function
to have
basis for
to result
research
of child-environment
relain the course of time. The
time dimension is not only used to accumulate outcome data, but also is
used as the axis on which developmental
processes take place. The object of investigation (0) is constantly intertwined with the environment
(C)-so we can think of a series of events: t(1) (0 ZG C) + t(2) (0 S C)
+ . . . +t(i)
(0 $ C), where t(1) . . . t(i) denote a sequence of time
intervals. What is studied is the sequential nature of the child’s action
upon the environment
and the feedback from the environment
to the
child, which at the next moment in time is used by the child in its next
action upon the environment.
At first glance, this description bears some
similarity to the traditions advocated by learning theories (e.g., Bijou &
Baer, 1961, 1965). That similarity is deceptive, since there exists a major
qualitative difference with the present ecological perspective. Whereas
the traditions of learning theories have usually emphasized adaptation by
the child to the given conditions of the environment, our present ecolog-
NATURALISTIC
ical perspective
presumes
tion of the environment
muking use of it in fLrther
RESEARCH
21.5
the child’s acti\!e reconstruction
and constrlrcin conjunction
\cith (and for the purpose
ofi
development.
The present ecological approach
follows from the social-constructivist
developmental
thinking of Piaget
(1970) and Vygotsky (1956, 1960). That line of thought leads to a relatively novel way of conceptualizing
the context of child developmentviewing the role of cultural meanings as the environment with which children are inevitably interrelated during their development.
Meaning as Context:
Child Development through Exchanges with a
Meaningful Environment
The examples of ecological and nonecological approaches illustrated
how decontextualization
of psychological phenomena has hindered our
understanding of child development.
The extraction of the phenomena
from their contexts eliminates any possibility of understanding how these
phenomena relate to these contexts. On the other hand, retaining the
context need not automatically
lead to ecological knowledge. Only when
the phenomenon is viewed in the process of its interaction with the context does ecological knowledge arise.
The meaning of behavioral phenomena is one of the contexts in child
psychology that is often eliminated from consideration.
In human cultures, all psychological phenomena acquire meanings. which may prove
to be essential for the understanding of behavioral phenomena. In the
past decade, the importance of the meaning of different psychological
phenomena to their studies have been mentioned more frequently (Armistead, 1974; Gergen, 1982; Neisser, 1982).
Decontextualization
of phenomena from their meaning in a culture has
been widespread in child psychology, due to the ahistoric traditions of the
discipline. These traditions were transcended partially in the 1920- 1930s
in Vygotsky’s
theorizing,
which remained largely uncompleted
(Vygotsky, 1956, 1960). Vygotsky came to recognize the relevance that the
meanings of psychological phenomena have for psychology as science.
The approach of the whole cultural-historical
school in psychology that
Vygotsky originated (see Van der Veer, 1984; Van IJzendoorn & Van der
Veer, 1984) is built on the analysis of the development of higher psychological processes which operate on the basis of meaning.
The Meaning of Meaning
Meaning certainly is another of the major terms used in psychology
that can be defined in many different ways. We can consider two dimensions-spatial
and temporal-to
analyze the meaning of meaning. The
temporal dimension involves the process of cultural change, whereas the
216
VALSINER
AND BENIGN1
spatial dimension illustrates the distribution of the meanings in a society
at a given time.
The meaning of signs in a culture can arise from the multitude of particular and idiosyncratic uses of the signs in social communication.
It is on
this point of theorizing that Vygotsky’s emphasis on the difference between “meaning”
and “sense” may be worth mentioning.
Vygotsky
states:
The sense of a word
is the sum of all the psychological events aroused in our
consciousness by the word. It is a dynamic, fluid, complex whole, which has several zones of unequal stability. Meaning is only one of the zones of sense, the most
stable and precise zone. A word acquires its sense from the context in which it
appears; m different contexts, it changes its sense. Meaning remains stable
throughout the changes of sense. (Vygotsky. 1962, p, 146).
The developing child is from the very beginning embedded in the context of meanings, as these are defined within the culture (e.g., meaning of
childbearing, indigenous understanding of conception and pregnancycf. Monberg, 197.5; meaning of abilities of children at different ages-cf.
Harkness & Super, 1983). In the immediate social environment of a developing child in any culture, these meanings guide child development by
providing a framework for parental understanding of child-rearing goals
and methods. In addition, these meanings help the parents to interpret
the development of their children. These cultural meanings constitute the
context of child development with which any behavioral events in children’s lives are interdependent.
On the other hand, the personal sense of a sign develops in the course
of the individual child’s ontogeny, and with assistance from the social
environment.
However, although the development of sense is aided by
that environment,
it is not determined by it. This constrained indeterminacy in the children’s sense development guarantees the open-ended
nature of cultural change, which is wrought by individuals’ transactions
with their cultural environments.
New meanings can emerge in the culture as a result of convergence of personal senses of different individuals.
Meaning, thus, is not a pregiven and immutable ideal entity, but a byproduct of social transaction that is used to regulate the person-environment relationships once it emerges.
Meanings are thus dynamic-they
emerge, develop, and dissipate in
their cultural contexts, interdependently
of the changes in the personal
senses of the members of the culture. A relativistic perspective is inevitable for an ecological approach in developmental psychology: children’s
development is indeed embedded in the context of cultural meanings and
can be studied productively
if the children’s relationships
with these
meanings are analyzed. On the other hand, these meanings themselves
are constantly undergoing change, part of which is due to the innovations
NATURALISTIC
that children
development.
introduce
217
RESEARCH
into their personal senses in the course of their
The Use and Nonuse
of Meaning
in Child
Psychology
Traditionally
psychology has taken its phenomena out of the system of
meanings that these phenomena have in the culture at a given time. For
example, the use of the concept of “attachment”
in child psychology is
usually detached from the historical-cultural
context within which it
originally was embedded (see Newcombe & Lerner, 1981). Instead, that
concept is often connected with the meaning system of the evolutionary
view on the parent-offspring
bond. The cultural meaning of that
however,
can
vary
in
the
course of history (Badinter,
1981;
“bond,”
Sunley, 1955; Wolfenstein, 1955). Viewed from a cross-cultural perspective the issues of “attachment”
between adults and children provide evidence of high variability of forms, dependent on the definition of the social roles of the parents and their sons or daughters. For example, cultures that have practiced infanticide and where the survival of an infant
during the first year of life is problematic,
the meaning of the infant for
the parents is vastly different from that in affluent Western middle-class
homes where infant mortality has ceased to be a problem. Likewise, the
80% of the world’s cultures that allow one or another form of polygamic
marriage (Stephens, 1963) provide the children with a social environment
in which issues of “attachment”
are often different from the monogamic
cases (Marvin, VanDevender, Iwanaga, Levine, & Levine, 1977; Valsiner, 1985). Last but not least, the meaning of father-infant
“attachment”-a
popular topic in contemporary occidental child psychologyis thoroughly embedded in the context of the social meaning of fatherhood in a given culture. For example, the “honeymoon
stage” in
father-newborn
relationships
that Blake, Stewart, and Turcan (1975)
have described under contemporary Western conditions does not exist in
the context of an Italian small town. Benigni (1983) studied the naturally
occurring newborn “rooming-in”
in the local hospital, where the newborns were housed in the same room with their mothers not because of
high principles of modern medicine, but due to the lack of space for a
separate newborn nursery. Fathers came regularly to visit their wives in
these hospital wards, and could therefore take their time to have their
“honeymoon”
with the new baby, had they been thus inclined. Such
“honeymoon”
was not observed. Instead, Benigni (1983) found that the
“hour of the fathers” in the postpartum ward turned into the “hour of
husbands”-instead
of rushing over to the crib to interact with the newborn, the fathers devoted the visiting hour to interacting with their wives
about practical everyday household matters. This finding provides another example of how a meaning-decontextualized
perspective of the tra-
218
VALSINER
AND
BENIGN1
ditional psychology can drastically mislead the investigator. Based on
these data, a psychologist may “diagnose”
that the fathers who were
observed were “uninvolved”
with their newborn babies, since they did
not demonstrate the expected behaviors of showing overwhelming and
unbounded fascination with the new baby. In contrast, a meaning-bound
(contextual) approach interprets the observed behavior as a natural outcome based on the meaning of husband/wife roles in the culture on the
one hand, and as a practical need for the fathers to talk over household
matters with their wives on the other. The case of the “visiting fathers”
can be judged according to the appropriateness of their behavior from the
standpoint of strict separation of male and female areas of competence in
life activities. The new father’s lack of interaction with his baby is expected by both men and women in the community. This expectancy, like
cultural roles, is controlled both externally (adults of both sexes expect
the father to stay at a distance from the baby) and internal/y
(the new
father has internalized that social expectancy into his system of rules and
sense).
A similar example of the central relevance of cultural meaning for organizing adult-newborn
contact comes from an account of the experiences of Westerners in Thailand:
We recently
visited a Thai friend who had just given birth to a bouncing
baby boy
in an upcountry
hospital.
The luck and fortune
of a baby is very fragile. We
came close to mishandling
that fragile
package
and causing
some cultural
breakage.
With an enthusiastic
lack of caution, we waxed eloquent
on the beauty
of the baby only to be stopped
in mid-sentence
by the mother’s
stern expression
and admonishing
raised hand. She remarked
disdainfully
that her son was, alas,
ugly and “black
as a Cambodian.”
We started to protest and again extolled
the
merits of the baby, but a warning
glance from a Thai nurse stopped us in time. We
finally left after, somewhat
hesitantly,
wishing the mother good health. The Thai
nurse followed
us out of the room and enlightened
us as to why the seemingly
not
so proud mother had been so disparaging
about her baby. We were told that one
must avoid praise and compliments
or the spirits will be attracted
to such a wondrous creature
and being jealous
will steal the baby for their own. Thus. the
mother,
in fooling the spirits, was as insulting
as possible.
(Klausner
& Klausner.
n.d., pp. 110-111).
Again, the cultural meaning of the whole setting guided the behavioral
events adults-newborn
interaction in this episode, which could not be
explained without the knowledge of its meaningful nature. The research
traditions in child psychology that have eliminated the cultural meanings
of behavioral or cognitive phenomena from their study of these phenomena (often in the belief that such separation guarantees “objectivity”
-which
is another culturally detined meaning) have contributed to the
state of affairs in our discipline where, as Wittgenstein (1980, p. 180e) has
noted, the “problems and methods pass each other by.” The decontex-
NATURALISTIC
RESEARCH
219
tualization of behavioral and cognitive phenomena from their meaning
has resulted in the illusion of the objectivity of different methods of psychology, the principles of construction
and application
of which are
themselves based on implicit cultural meanings.
CONCLUSIONS
Efforts to increase the ecological “validity”
of the research in child
development are not new. At different times, child psychologists have
paid attention to the children’s environments,
sometimes labeling such
interest “ecological.”
There have been different extrascientific reasons
for the use of such label. Research that addresses psychological issues in
applied contexts seems to have stronger pressures from society to be
“ecologically
valid.”
For example. both Bronfenbrenner
(1974) and
Clarke-Stewart (1977) had public policy issues on their minds when they
described psychology’s shortcomings and suggested methodological
remediation through an “ecological approach.” The result of widespread
use of the term “ecological”
has been its extension, which has often resulted its becoming synonymous with the term “naturalistic.”
We showed that the use of that term as such a descriptive synonym
provides no basis for theoretical advancement in developmental
psychology. Theoretically
it makes no difference whether a particular behavior (or cognitive function) of children is viewed in their everyday life
environments or in a laboratory-as
long as the children’s psychological
phenomena are decontextualized
in the process of the study and its data
analysis. We argued that developmental
processes can be studied only if
the child-environmental
relationships become the object of investigation, and the term “ecological”
was suggested to be used only for the
study of exchange processes between the child and environment.
The
environment of the developing human child is structured by the cultural
meaning system. Therefore, the ecological approach as advocated in this
paper suggests that the children’s developing relationships
with that
meaning system, as it can be observed in the process of children’s construction of personal senses of objects and events, constitutes one of the
most important domains for ecological developmental psychology.
This application of the term “ecological”
to child-environment
relationships follows from the view on child development from the perspective of open systems. Since only open systems are capable of development, it is obligatory that developmental
psychology should build its
theoretical basis along lines which are diametrically
opposite to the traditions of nondevelopmental
sciences. Perhaps one of the most drastic
oversights in much of child psychology has been the separation of children’s psychological
phenomena from their culturally meaningful contexts, reserving the study of the latter to the occasional enthusiasm of
220
VALSINER
AND
BENIGN1
anthropologists
and linguists. We argued that an “ecological approach”
in child psychology is a developmental
view that is based on the central
importance of the process of the child’s relationships with hislher meanin&Idly structured environment.
The empirical study of the latter is not
possible in the framework of traditional psychology, but requires innovative methodological
integration of anthropological
knowledge and techniques with the research goals and methods of developmental
psychology. An empirical study of child development in naturalistic settings
does not automatically
qualify as an “ecological approach,” as long as
the richness of the materials collected in these settings is not complemented by adequate intellectual sophistication of the theoretical efforts
of the investigators.
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RECEIVED:
May
29, 1985: REVISED:
October
25. 1985