1985/09/01 by Howard Andrews, Howard F. Andrews · 26 citations
Health Professions · Medicine · Nursing · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Children's Rights and Participation #Community Health and Development #Context (archaeology) #Demography #Early Childhood Education and Development #Ecological psychology #Ecology #Geography #Health geography #Health promotion #Hierarchy #International health #Intervention (counseling) #Medicine #Nursing #Perspective (graphical) #Political science #Population #Psychology #Public health #Scale (ratio) #Social ecology #Social psychology #Sociology #Variety (cybernetics) #Welfare
paper · doi:10.1111/j.1467-8306.1985.tb00072.x
published in Annals of the Association of American Geographers 75(3), 370-382 (American Association of Geographers)
openalex publication_date 1985/09/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22
A review of research and practice underlying preventive intervention to enhance children's health and welfare identifies a progressive evolution of the traditional medical model toward an expanded socioecological perspective. This expanded perspective implies that consideration should be given to a broader set of factors affecting children's health and welfare—factors that operate at spatial scales removed from children's immediately experienced worlds and that thus place them at risk indirectly. The nature of risks to child development and health are described and related to Bronfenbrenner's (1979) framework for investigating the ecological dimensions of human development. I propose a hierarchy of spatial scales for preventive intervention efforts and identify the three scales of social situation, ecological setting, and cultural context of children's lives as embracing the variety of risk factors suggested by Bronfenbrenner's framework. Recent research on the different ways in which helping networks operate in urban neighborhoods suggests a means of identifying population sub-groups for preventive intervention at the scale of children's activities and experience.