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Bioecological Theory, Early Child Development and the Validation of the Population-Level Early Development Instrument

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Abstract

The Early Development Instrument (EDI; Janus and Offord in Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science 39:1–22, 2007) project is a Canadian population-level, longitudinal research project, in which teacher ratings of Kindergarten children’s early development and wellbeing are linked to health and academic achievement variables at the individual level, and to demographic, cultural, and socioeconomic variables at the community level. In this article, we draw from Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological theory of human development to create a coherent theoretical framework for guiding validation research within a population-level approach to child development research in general and for the EDI project in particular. The discussion draws from a range of social and health sciences as well as validity theory. The paper seeks to align complex conceptual, theoretical, methodological, and psychometric considerations, to provide specific design, methodology, and validation recommendations for a population-level approach to studying children’s development and wellbeing, and to discuss the strengths and challenges of this approach.

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Notes

  1. The illustrations adhere to conventional structural equation model, or path analysis, notation, and follow Bollen and Lennox’ (1991) recommendations for distinguishing between composite indicators, such as socioeconomic status, and effect indicators, such as school readiness and academic achievement, for both of which the arrows represent, respectively, the direction of association. For associations among constructs, arrows with open-shaped arrow heads are used, and for relationships between measures and constructs, arrows with solid heads are used.

  2. The authors recognizes the multiple—and often conflicting—definitions of the term “(school) readiness”. In this paper, the term school readiness is used to refer to the teachers’ assessment of their Kindergarten class children’s developmental status in five different domains. For a current review of theoretical and empirical approaches to school readiness the reader is directed to Pianta et al. (2007). With regard to the EDI, Janus and Offord (2007) explicitly differentiate school readiness from readiness (to learn from birth), and consider school readiness to consist of a set of competences that will allow children to benefit from educational activities offered in the school environment (Janus and Offord 2000). In this paper, the term school readiness is consistently used.

  3. Cf. Meisels (1999) for this categorization of school readiness theories.

  4. With respect to Fig. 2, this perspective would be placed in the upper right quadrant—(emphasizing group characteristics and the role of experiences on development)—whereas traditionally widely employed school readiness tests would have to be placed in the lower left quadrant—(emphasizing individual characteristics and the developmental primacy of genetics and maturation).

  5. The (University of) Chicago School is typically associated with ‘sociology’, but it needs to be noted that several of its influential scholars, like Dewey, Mead, and Blumer, came from backgrounds of philosophy and education, (social) psychology, and sociology, respectively.

  6. It is well-understood, however, how poverty at the individual and family level goes hand in hand with developmentally detrimental processes, such as poor nutrition, enduring stress, exposure to toxic environments, and lack of developmentally positive experiences and opportunities (Berliner 2005).

  7. The Gini coefficient is a statistical index used to describe the distribution of income in a population, where 0 means absolute equality of income (i.e., everyone has the same) and 1 means absolute inequality (i.e., one person has everything). A definition and world map showing each country’s Gini coefficient can be found at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient.

  8. See Raudenbush and Sampson (1999) for a discussion of methodological and conceptual issues pertaining to the assessment of ecological settings.

  9. It is noteworthy that the term interaction is used in different meaning in these two propositions. In the first, it is used to refer to processes occurring between the developing person and its environment. In the second, it refers to the concept of interactions as used in the field of statistics, where interactions refer to situations in which the effects of one (or more) factor(s) are moderated (i.e., amplified, attenuated, or reversed) by one (or more) other factor(s) with regard to an outcome.

  10. This point is stressed, because research using multiple regression and multi-level analyses often fails to examine interactions, potentially because researchers assume that partitioning variance among multiple main effects is, in effect, accounting for ‘interactions’ between those variables. However, interaction terms must, of course, be statistically modeled by producing multiplicative interaction terms and by including them in the regression equations in addition to the main effect variables (cf. Cohen et al. 2003).

  11. While DAP has gained much currency in both the theory and practice of early childhood programs, it has not been universally embraced. Some scholars have critiqued DAP as relying too much on universal notions of child development and the imposition of western ideas of child development on minority groups and on non-western societies. For a discussion, readers are referred to Kessler and Swadener (1992).

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  1. University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada

    Martin Guhn & Hillel Goelman

  2. Human Early Learning Partnership, University of British Columbia, 4th Floor, Library Processing Centre, 2206 East Mall, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z3, Canada

    Martin Guhn

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Guhn, M., Goelman, H. Bioecological Theory, Early Child Development and the Validation of the Population-Level Early Development Instrument. Soc Indic Res 103, 193–217 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-011-9842-5

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