Contextual Factors in Risk and Prevention Research

Abstract

This paper reviews how cascading levels of contextual influences, starting with family factors and extending to neighborhood and school factors, can affect children’s behavioral and emotional development. The ability of contextual factors to trigger or to attenuate children’s underlying temperament and biological risk factors is emphasized. Recognition of the powerful effects of an array of contextual factors on children’s development has clear implications for preventive interventions as well. Intervention research can explore the effects of multicomponent interventions directed at children’s family and peer contextual influences, can examine how contextual factors predict children’s responsivity to interventions, and can examine how contextual factors have effects on how, and how well, interventions are delivered in the real worlds of schools and community agencies. Efforts to understand the development of childhood psychopathology have placed growing emphasis on contextual factors that influence children’s developmental trajectories leading to antisocial outcomes. A child’s developmental course is set within the child’s social ecology, and an ecological framework is needed to understand these effects (Conduct Problems Prevention Research Group, 1992; Greenberg, Lengua, Coie, Pinderhughes, & Conduct Problems Prevention Research Group, 1999; Tolan, Gorman-Smith, Huesmann, & Zelli, 1997). Children not only have important interactions in their microsystems of growing social fields of child-family, child-peer, and teacherstudent interactions, but these social fields also relate to each other in