Still Misused After All These Years? A Reevaluation of the Uses of Bronfenbrenner's Bioecological Theory of Human Development A theoretical review published in 2009 revealed that scholars who stated that their research was based on Urie Bronfenbrenner's bioecological theory of human development rarely used it appropriately.To what extent has the situation changed since then? We used the same methods to identify relevant articles as had been used in the 2009 article and found 20 publications whose authors explicitly claimed that Bronfenbrenner provided the theoretical foundation for their study. Although 18 of those publications included citations to the mature (mid-1990s) version of Bronfenbrenner's theory, only two appropriately described, tested, and evaluated the four major concepts of Bronfenbrenner's theory-proximal processes, person characteristics, context, and time. Failure either to correctly describe the theory or to critically test its central concepts poses significant problems for the future of family studies and developmental science. We discuss potential ways to improve this situation through metatheoretical, methodological, and pedagogical reflections.

Previous research has shown that children and adults express more confidence in the existence of unobservable scientific (e.g., germs), as compared to religious, phenomena (e.g., the soul). We asked if the same pattern would emerge among parents ( N = 77) and children ( N = 85) in Iran, a country with widespread commitment to religious values and beliefs. Parents expressed confidence in the existence of various scientific and religious phenomena but were more confident that scientific phenomena exist. Moreover, even though Iranian parents expressed a high valuation of both science and religion, their valuation of science was higher than that of religion. Like their parents, older children also expressed greater confidence in the existence of scientific, as compared to religious, phenomena. We conclude that with age, the kind of discourse children are exposed to elicits more confidence in the existence of scientific phenomena even in a religious society.

This study aimed to examine children's expression of gratitude in Brazil, China, Guatemala, Russia, South Korea, Turkey, and the United States. Participants (N = 2,265) consisted of 7-to 14-year-olds (M = 10.56, SD = 2.09; 54.4% girls). Using hierarchical cluster analysis, we found four clusters of gratitude expression: (a) Russia and Turkey (moderate-high expression of connective, low concrete, and moderate verbal gratitude), (b) Brazil and the United States (low connective, higher rates of concrete, and moderate-high rates of verbal gratitude), (c) China and South Korea (higher rates of connective, lower concrete, and lower-moderate verbal gratitude), and (d) Guatemala (lower rates of concrete and connective gratitude, and higher rates of verbal gratitude). In addition, we found common trends in age-related differences for verbal and concrete gratitude among most societies. These findings support the argument for diligence in avoiding implicit generalizations based on research conducted mostly in Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic (WEIRD) societies.