Sameroff’s Transactional Model: A Framework for Research

• In Event: Exploring Daily Social Transactions of Resilient Youth in Various Contexts Around the Globe

Abstract

The focus of this session will be to a) discuss Sameroff’s Transactional Model (2010) as a framework for research when investigating the lives of children and youth and b) demonstrate how a team of international resiliency researchers have attempted to embrace this methodology.
Sameroff and Fiese (1990; 2000) describe individual developmental outcomes as a combination of both the individual and their experience and explain that competence grows from a complex interplay between the child and the range of interactions they experience from parents, siblings, friends, the community and the economic and cultural context in which they find themselves. Sameroff and Fiese describe these interactions as dynamic interchanges that create change both in the individual and in the environment in which they find themselves across time and label these dynamic interchanges as transactions. Consequently, they remind us that child’s long term outcome is neither a function of their internal state (biologically or psychologically) nor the initial state of the environment (socially or culturally) but a complex interplay or transaction between the two across time.
Sameroff (2010) describes these transactions as being omnipresent and as such affect all levels of the developing system in which children or youths finds themselves. It is understood that children’s long term outcomes grow from multiple contributions at all levels of their ecology as well as their own biologic and psychological contributions but the difficulty for the researcher is “how does one begin to design research methodologies that have the capacity to investigate this transactional change across time?” Sameroff acknowledges this difficulty and states even that though it has been more than thirty years since the transactional model was first articulated, and although it has been referenced extensively, there is still a paucity of empirical work on the reciprocal effects of change in the child and the environment. He explains that the most common use of this model has been to investigate the “unidirectional effects of environmental risk factors on development, rather than the more complex bidirectional interplay between dynamic systems (p.23).
The Authors in their work on resilience have attempted to address this paucity of empirical work by creating a research design that has the capacity to probe the implications of transactional effects of parents, family and culture on the development of youth. They have explored youth perceptions and community perspectives on what it means to do well under adverse circumstances in a range of cultures and contexts by utilizing a variety of methodological tools that they believe are more sensitive to investigating change, transactionally. Consequently, in order to respond to Sameroff’s call regarding the need to use methodologies that have the capacity to capture transactional effects I will be discussing this innovative methodology and the tools that the team have used to discuss if and how they have been successful in capturing the transactional effects between the youth and their ecology, and how this additional knowledge provides us with a deeper understanding of the factors of resilience.

Author

• Lynda Phillips, Douglas College