Human Behavior in the Social Environment
Social Constructs and Adaptation
Social Constructs: Concepts or perceptions that are created and defined by society.
Social Adaptation: People's adjustment to various life events, traumas, situations, or changes.
Resilience: Patterns of positive adaptation during or following significant adversity or risk.
Developmental Standards: Broad tasks that depend on human capabilities and societal goals, varying across cultures but widely shared.
Normative Age-Graded Influences: Predictable changes tied to a person’s age.
Normative History-Graded Influences: Predictable changes tied to a particular historical era, also called cohort effects or period effects.
Cohort and Age Norms
Cohort: Individuals born in the same generation, experiencing different norms for developmental tasks.
Generation: Defined as a period of approximately 20 years. (e.g., Millennials)
Age Norms: Societal expectations for a person’s behavior at a specific age or phase of development.
Non-Normative Events: Unpredictable events that do not happen to everyone, classified as risk or protective factors.
Risk and Protective Factors
Risk Factors: Established threats to human developmental and behavioral outcomes.
Strengths and supports can buffer the effects of risk factors.
Cumulative-Risk Hypothesis: Negative development is associated with the accumulation of risk factors over time, rather than single risk factors.
risk factors exponentially increase the chances of a negative outcome.
Protective Factors: Factors that explain and predict good adaptation in the face of adversity.
Bohem’s View: Enhancing physical and social functioning.
Social Functioning: Ability to accomplish daily tasks (e.g., obtaining food, shelter, transportation) and fulfill social roles as defined by the client’s community or subculture.
Perspectives on Human Behavior
Developmental Flexibility is the capacity of humans to adapt and thrive in changing environments.
Culture differentiates human animals from other social animals.
Cultural Variations and Development
How age or identity is viewed in different cultures varies.
Examples: How U.S. society views age vs. how Southern Asian culture views age.
Cultural intersection of women and age.
Cultural Values and Ethnocentrism
Values are a major component of any culture.
It's important to understand rather than condone or discredit behaviors or thinking of others.
Ethnocentrism: Tendency to view practices of others as immoral, inappropriate, or inferior based on one’s own community standards.
Cultural Competence
CLAS Standards: Standards to help healthcare professionals eliminate disparities in healthcare due to culturally and linguistically inappropriate services.
Professionals need to work effectively within the context of cultural beliefs, behaviors, and needs of diverse consumers, including marginalized groups due to religious beliefs, physical disabilities, social class, or sexual orientation.
Global Communications and Globalization
Globalization: A process by which cultures influence one another and become more alike through trade, immigration, and the exchange of information and ideas.
Genetic Dispositions and Temperament
Temperament: Individual differences in reactivity and self-regulation, influenced by heredity and experience.
Reactivity: Excitability, responsiveness, or arousal level of physical and behavioral systems to immediate stimulus events or internal changes.
Temperamental tendencies are influenced by beliefs and goals based on experiences in their social environment.
Social Environment and Possibilism
Environments can both influence and constrain behavior.
Possibilism: The physical environment offers various possibilities for people to select ways of using their habitat.
The social environment includes expectations, motives, and incentives that shape and place limits on behavior, constructed by other people in a person's social world.
Social workers need to consider how a person's membership in different-sized social systems influences their behavior.
Ecological Systems Theory
Ecological systems theory recognizes that human beings can be understood only in the context of the systems in which they live.
Holistic View: The whole is more than the sum of its parts.
Opposite of holism is Reductionism: Understanding problems by focusing on smaller and smaller units.
Reciprocal transactions between people and the social environment.
Basic Ideas from Ecological Systems Perspective
Social work practice is based on a dual focus: the person and situation, and the system and its environment.
Social work practice occurs at the interface between the human system and its environment, and the ways each influences the other.
Social work practice is best conducted when the transactions promote growth and development of the organism while simultaneously being ameliorative to the environment.
Bronfenbrenner’s Approach
Four categories or levels of systems to conceptualize person and environment transactions:
Microsystems: Face-to-face or direct contact among system participants.
Mesosystems: The network of personal settings.
Exosystems: Systems in which an individual is not directly involved.
Macrosystems: Larger subcultural and cultural contexts.
Culture: A system of meanings and values shared by a population and transmitted to future generations.
Crisis Theory
Provides social workers with useful concepts for understanding how people cope with stressful events, traumas, and other life circumstances.
Helps identify levels of adjustment or maladjustment in a person’s responses to stressful circumstances.
Lindemann's study of survivors' grief responses: survivors had to change by detaching from relationships with the deceased and forming new attachments.
Crisis refers to any rapid change or encounter that provides an individual with a ‘no exit’ challenge.
Life Events Research
Stress represents any event in which environmental demands, internal demands, or both tax or exceed the adaptive resources of an individual.
Normative life changes also can produce symptoms of psychopathology and other forms of social maladjustment.
Erikson viewed a crisis as a challenge and opportunity to choose between polarities associated with key developmental tasks.
Life Span and Life Stage Models
Stage or Growth Models: Postulate recognizable stages that need to be addressed at different ages (e.g., Erikson’s eight stages).
Lifespan Models: Do not postulate age-specific challenges but rather see personality development as a continuous process of adjustment to challenges (e.g., various phases of life).
Life Course
Studying changes in patterns of life or in social-environmental pathways.
Investigates people’s life paths in historical context and situational circumstances.
People have common human needs associated with varying life tasks, but these needs are not as universal as once assumed.
Life-Span Perspective
The study of behaviors, dispositions, skills, and traits over a substantial period of the life span.
Clarifying how specific psychological functions, traits, and skills in one stage of development compare with other stages.
Controversy: whether traits or behavioral propensities are continuous or discontinuous.
Cumulative Continuity: Behavior at one point in life influences opportunities and behavior later in life.
Self-Selection: A person’s tendency to select contexts and experiences that are consistent with personality traits.
Change occurs across the entire span of a person’s life (Plasticity).
Earlier theories subscribed to Funnel Theory: people have a declining capacity for change as they age.
Application to Delinquency
General theory of crime and delinquency: the behavior of delinquents is sufficiently homogeneous to be explained by a single or common set of causal factors.
A life-span approach to delinquency: two types of offenders: life-course-persistent and adolescent-limited.
Differing trajectories are caused by fundamentally different factors.
To interpret trajectories need to consider, the current intensity of aggression and the developmental trajectory of aggression and its relation to age norms.
Life-Course Assumptions
Defined as age-differentiated life patterns embedded in social institutions that are subject to historical changes.
Focuses on understanding changes in patterns of life, rather than on understanding changes in personality, traits, or behavior.
The life-course perspective uses the concept of trajectory to understand the environmental paths or the social paths followed by people in key social domains of life: work, marriage, crime, and parenthood.
Trajectory refers to a specific path or line of development followed by a person to a specific life outcome.
Role transitions are embedded in trajectories.
A change from one of these states to another constitutes a transition.
Promoting Strengths, Assets, and Good Lives
Every individual has strengths, and their families, schools, faith institutions, and communities have resources that, when aligned with these strengths can promote positive development.
Assumption that development is plastic and that people are resources to be developed.
A good life is defined as “using your signature strengths every day to produce authentic happiness and abundant gratification.”