ABSTRACT
Bronfenbrenner (1979b) pointed out that most data in studies of environmental influence on development consist of information about mostly the characteristics of the children rather than about the settings in which they grow. The data focus on differences among children growing up in different contexts rather than on the dimensions along which these contexts differ from each other. Thus, for example, the infant day-care debate focuses on attachment as a developmental outcome of children growing up in different settings instead of focusing on different dimensions or characteristics of the settings in which a child develops different quality attachments (e.g., quality of care, stability of care arrangements). Bronfenbrenner pointed to the absence of a theoretical framework appropriate for analyzing childrearing environments and the need to define transcontextual parameters for such an analysis.
