Developmental Contextualism

Developmental Contextualism

The Focus is on the Context!!

Developmental Contextualism

Developed by Richard Lerner

Types of Subcategories to Adolescent Development

• Constitutes a new, powerful, perspective of human development different from those proposed in the past.

• Focuses on the interaction between the growing, that is, the continuously changing individual, and the ecological context within which a person lives.

• Family Structure
• Family Climate Decision Making
• Family recreational and leisure time activities
• Family Size
• Socioeconomic variables
• Quality and level of Supervision
• Family Harmony and cohesion

The family context may serve as one limited illustration. Example: the relationship between parents and adolescents.

While many or all of the factors have been researched in the past, often in isolation, contextualism views the interdependence of all these factors as its theoretical agenda.

More specifically, family diversity refers to a multitude of conditions and circumstances under which different families live and its members interact. Family structure or size are categories that have the potential for influencing parent-adolescent relationships as well as more general adolescent development.

They may either enhance positive development, or they may contribute to adolescent problem behavior such as smoking, drinking, drug use, etc. Each of the broad categories could have a number of significant contextual subcategories.

• The Dynamic interactions between the organism and its characteristics, and the various components of the social and physical setting.

The Contribution of Contextualism

Contextualism tends to focus in on:

• the continuous interaction patterns of most of these factors
• the influence of the continuous changes over time, historically speaking (e.g. the emergence of TV after World War II, etc.) and the changes from day to day, such as the emotions or moods of family members
• the conceptualization that the adolescent (or the child) is a major contributing factor in shaping family context.

• Context is conceptualized as the central idea of the theory of contextualism and is an interactive system of social variables that are, in large part, responsible for development.

Underlying Meaning of Developmental Contextualism

References

Steinberg, L. (2010). Adolescence (9th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill Higher Education. ISBN: 0073405485

Developmental Contextualism allows for ever changing relationships variables: temperament, innate constitutional factors, physical strength and appearance, interactions between parents and adolescents, past school experiences, or broader events in the community or in the nation, as well as the strictly physical environment

"Everything determines and is determined by everything else"

Context always changes and because context is the variable that modifies development, "change" is an inevitable part of existence that affects each individual differently

Discussion & Activity

Interactional Model of Adolescent Development