Teachers serve as role models for how peers should interact, and therefore are an important influence in shaping the peer ecology in their classrooms (Hendrickx et al., 2016). Teacher–pupil relationships provide a framework by which children build social competence and shape their peer interactions. Teachers, therefore, can provide a valuable developmental model, mediating children’s social development and facilitating connectedness and bonding within the classroom (Bouchard & Smith, 2017).
Components of the exosystem can have an indirect influence on bullying via a trickledown effect (Patton et al., 2013). For example, parental stress created by factors such as financial pressure, personal problems, and workplace experiences can impact on parenting practices and the home environment where the child is based (Patton et al., 2013). In addition, the media is a powerful tool and evidence shows that certain forms of aggression are frequently represented in popular television programs, and that exposure to such material can impact on subsequent behavior (Coyne & Archer, 2004; Coyne et al., 2004).
At the macro level, societal laws, policies, and social and religious norms that embed discriminatory practices against minority groups can engender bullying. For example, homophobic bullying is a symptom of societal attitudes towards LGBT communities and the reinforcement of heteronormativity by the media (Hong & Garbarino, 2012; Newman & Fantus, 2015). Politically, national frameworks requiring schools to implement policies and take specific action will benefit the children attending schools at that time (Pitsia & Mazzone, 2020). Here, the macrosystem and chronosystem interact, as historical timings will impact on children’s experiences (Elder, 1998). Bullying is a more prominent social issue now than it was in the past, with statutory requirements introduced in many countries for schools to have antibullying policies and preventative measures that were not previously in place. This will mean that children’s awareness about bullying will be heightened, and their experience in school when bullying occurs will be different compared to their predecessors. In addition, bullying itself has evolved over time as a result of changes in broader social milieu (Smith & Berkkun, 2020). Increase in societal usage of technology and advancing tools for online communication have enabled bullying to take place in circumstances that would previously have required face‐to‐face interaction (Smith‐Darden et al., 2017). The term “cyberbullying” (Espelage et al., 2013) has been coined to describe bullying happening via the use of technology, and new terminology has been developed to label the various manifestations of cyberbullying (for example, trolling) (Maunder & Crafter, 2018).
There is evidence that young people who are bullied at school are more likely to be bullied in the workplace in adulthood (Brendgen & Poulin, 2018). Brendgen and Poulin propose “evocative person‐environment transactions” (p. 35) to explain these child–adulthood bullying trajectories, whereby individual vulnerability to bullying based on personal characteristics may incite negative behaviors from others, but also being bullied in childhood causes negative outcomes (such as depressive thoughts and feelings) which can generate negative interaction patterns with others. This resonates with Elder’s life course perspective (1998), whereby bullying in childhood leaves a legacy – impacting on people’s future trajectories, feelings about themselves, and relationships with others (Maunder & Crafter, 2018). Furthermore, using Elder’s (1998) notion of “linked lives,” experiences of bullying impact not only on the children involved, but also their parents. Parents can experience a range of emotions and respond in different ways in their desire to protect their children and are therefore involved with and affected by bullying (Hale et al., 2017; Harcourt et al., 2014). This highlights the “complex etiology” of bullying, and the constellation of factors that interact together – supporting the application of ecological perspectives (Hong & Espelage, 2012; Swearer & Doll, 2001).
Adopting an ecological perspective to bullying requires intervention approaches designed to address the complex multilayered influences. Interventions need to target multiple levels of risk and protective factors in the ecological system and involve school and communities in prevention efforts (Espelage et al., 2013). Divecha and Brackett (2020) argue that prevention needs more than just school‐level action, and they set out a tiered approach targeting each layer of the ecological system. It seems then that current thinking within the field is drawing on ecological perspectives as a way of understanding, preventing, and managing bullying, and it offers much potential to help contextualize a very complex problem.
Implications for Research and Intervention
It is hopefully apparent from the material discussed in the previous sections that ecological perspectives have a lot to offer in our understanding of social development. First, they enable us to recognize the complexity of factors that contribute to social development. This moves attention away from focusing purely on individual characteristics (such as biology and personality) to also considering influential factors in the social context children are part of. Second, ecological perspectives encourage us to consider intersecting components of social development rather than viewing them in isolation. For example, we have seen in the examples discussed in this chapter that experiences in one area of social development (such as parenting) can influence those in another (such as bullying) and vice versa. Development is fluid, dynamic, and needs to be viewed holistically. Third, ecological perspectives suggest we should be wary of making assumptions about the universality of developmental stages or processes. Our understandings of social development need to be sensitive to social and cultural variation rather than generalizing to all children and young people.
A challenge of adopting an ecological lens to social development is designing empirical research that effectively captures the complex interplay between person and environment, and that enables contextual factors to be explored. Elder’s previously mentioned research into the Great Depression (1974) adopted a longitudinal approach to examine changes over time and study the trajectories of development across different times and places. This enabled an in‐depth study of the life course, and influences that occurred at different stages. Studies like this can be immensely powerful in highlighting the value of ecological perspectives in understanding human experiences but may not always be feasible given limited resources and practical considerations.
Recent literature in the domains of social development examined in this chapter show the potential for other research approaches utilizing quantitative and qualitative techniques. For example, Hong et al. (2018) used a large‐scale survey to measure the correlates of cyberbullying in South Korean adolescents. Parts of the survey were designed to measure factors in different layers of Bronfenbrenner’s ecological system, including questions relating to individual variables (such as age, gender), family factors (such as parental abuse and neglect), peer relationships, school factors (such as connectedness, teacher abuse), neighborhood safety, and economic hardship. Such techniques are useful to enable many ecological influences to be measured within a single study and illustrate how ecological perspectives can be applied as an explanatory model in large samples. However, the practicality of measuring multiple elements within a survey meant that some factors were only measured via a single item and were based on self‐report. This limits the applicability of the method to children with lower literacy levels and means that the complexity of individual experience is not captured.
As an alternative, in the field of parenting, Singh and Naicker (2019) used in‐depth qualitative interviews with sample of teenage mothers (16–18 years old) from secondary schools in a specific region in South Africa where there were conditions of economic deprivation and unemployment. Nuanced insight into their experiences was gained through their accounts, seeing how they built resilience in the context of surrounding cultural norms and adverse social conditions. Nevertheless, the findings are tightly bound to the study setting, and dependent on appropriate access and strong participant–researcher relationships.
This shows that there is the potential for researchers to draw on different methodologies when studying ecological factors. It is too straightforward to prioritize one methodological approach over another as they can each provide valuable insight in particular situations. Importantly, the research needs to be socially relevant in order to effectively capture the person–environment interaction. Research
