Jean Piaget's Bioecological Model

Psychologists study human behaviors through exploring an individual’s experiences, personality traits, and through the categorization of each into a specific or set of disorders (Hothersall, 2003). Early psychologists studying human behavior addressed its vast nature of human behavior yet failed to consider the circumstance(s) that contributed to the behavior even though they acknowledged nature versus nurture. An example of this is Jean Piaget’s cognitive theory, which examined the behavior of children but failed to fully acknowledge the impact of the adult on this behavior. Instead he theorized that children learn on their own without the intervention of older children or adults and that children are intrinsically, or internally, motivated
All three of these models of consider broader systems of influence and behavioral fluctuations based on environment as well as the individual’s role in bringing about change in their environment. In the bioecological model, the person-process-context element is the foundation for the systems within the model (Bronfenbrenner, 1986). The person-process-context element consists of four concepts. The first concept, process, explains how the individual and their environment engage interact and where the individual is changed by this environment. These processes are proximal when they occur on a fairly regular basis, such as through a school or daycare. The person concept of this element deals with the idea that a person’s characteristics play an active role in their environment. Bronfenbrenner used the temperament of infants as an example of this concept stating that a calm child will be treated differently than a child who is constantly crying (1986). Context involves the consideration of all systems from the bioecological model (microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem, and chronosystem) and their effects on proximal processes (Bronfenbrenner,
The family life cycle approach instead focuses on the movement across time of a single, multigenerational family unit (Carter & McGoldrick, 1988). Each model considers the same influences, but the unit of focus differs. The developmental psychopathology and family life cycle models deal directly with pathological dysfunction in the system (Carter & McGoldrick, 1988; Sroufe, 1997). Sroufe (1997) considers what the antecedent was to a given pathological behavior while Carter and McGoldrick (1998) deem pathological behavior occurring as a result from troubled family