Children-in-Environments

Physical, Interpersonal, and Sociocultural Aspects

Abstract

This paper focuses on some ways in which a current systems-orientedxtension of Werner's (1957) organismicdevelopmental perspective shapes empirical approaches to the study of children-in-cnvironments. Specifically, a concern with holism leads us to examine mutually defining transactions (experience and action) or children-inenvironments. Toward illustrating the ways in which we assess the parts - here, aspects of the environment - and then some relations between and /or among them, three sets of studies, of increasing complexity, are reviewed. The first concerns the physical aspect of the environment (age differences in children's experience and representation of a multifunctional, physical microenvironment). The second concerns relations between the physical and interpersonal aspects of the environments (children's experience of places vs. people). The third considers relations among the physical, interpersonal, and sociocultUral aspects of the environment (effects of open versus closed adoption on children and their families). Acknowledging that the pressure to make a problem amenable to analysis as well as the need to create assessment techniques to understand the parts which comprise the whole often contribute to one falling short of a truly holistic analysis, we conclude by outlining an ideal study which examines the transactions of the adoptive triad (adoptee, adoptive parents, birthparents) vis-a-vis all aspects of the environment (physical, interpersonal, sociocultural). Our suggestion is that it may be of greater value in ecologically-oriented empirical research to reduce the number of focal children studied rather than the number and kind of interrelationships among aspects of the child, of the environment, and of the systems to which he/she belongs.