438 Community Psychology
should community psychologists conduct ecological and
contextual analyses?”
Following the Swampscott Conference, the answer to this
question has primarily been the “Ecological Framework.”
Though the history of ecological theory began, in practice, in
the 1930s with the work of Lewin (see Swartz & Martin,
1997), the tradition of ecological thought in the context of
community psychology research and intervention began in
the 1960s with the work of James G. Kelly and colleagues
(Kelly, 1966, 1968; Trickett, Kelly, & Todd, 1972). Inspired
by Barker, Kelly’s (1967, 1968) translation of concepts from
biological ecology to the human social system gave commu-
nity psychologists a theoretical framework for both research
and intervention from which they could begin to conceptual-
ize persons-in-context. Kelly (1970, 1971, 1986) discussed
the purpose of ecologically oriented community research to
understand those social processes that promote the health and
well-being of individuals and organizations: “The prospect of
obtaining knowledge about the positive development of per-
sons in natural settings could be increased if psychologists
worked to create empirical data about the ways in which
communities evolve and how they establish criteria and
norms” (Kelly, 1971, p. 135). He suggested that future com-
munity psychologists be trained to recognize the existing re-
sources in communities and understand how these resources
contribute to the success of community members. Under-
standing these processes has many implications for interven-
tion initiatives, as intervention efforts are expected to be
more successful when focused on supporting the natural
strengths in a community (Cowen, 2000b; Kelly, 1968; Kelly
et al., 1988).
To illustrate, one setting selected to elaborate the ecologi-
cal perspective was schools (Chesler & Fox, 1966; Edwards &
Kelly, 1980; Kelly, 1968; B. E. Long, 1968; Schmuck,
Chesler, & Lippitt, 1966; Trickett et al., 1972). These authors
worked to identify systems-level resources and their impact
on the positive development of children. Specifically, Kelly
and colleagues (1968, 1979; Edwards & Kelly, 1980) applied
the framework to expand the understanding of the impacts of
high school settings on students’ behaviors and advance
thinking on the use of natural resources of high schools.
These scholars made meaningful contributions to the process
of conceptualizing and researching human behavior with
their sharp contrast to traditional psychological modes of
conducting research in which “context stripping” has been
part and parcel in methods of experimental design (Mishler,
1979, p. 2).
Within the field of developmental psychology, the work of
Urie Brofennbrenner made another contribution to the field’s
conceptualization of the person-in-context. Though this theory
evolved after and separately from the ecological metaphor
described by Kelly and his colleagues, Bronfenbrenner’s
developmental-ecological model also departed from Barker’s
work in the 1950s. He supported the idea that “human devel-
opment is a product of interaction between the growing human
organism and its environment” and critiqued the larger field of
psychology for focusing on “the person and only the most rudi-
mentary conception and characterization of the environment in
which the person is found” (Brofenbrenner, 1979, p. 16).
Following the theoretical and empirical work of Barker,
Kelly, and Brofenbrenner, the emphasis on studying context
and its influence on a person’s behavior became formalized in
community psychology. However, issues arose in applying
these concepts to conducting research. Tensions arose around
the extent to which the field was still wedded to individually
oriented research and practice. Beginning in 1967, a series of
conferences began to address these concerns. As Ira Iscoe
(1997) said, “There was a noted malaise that Community
Psychology was not moving ahead... and such terms as the
need to abandon psychic determinism for a recognition of
the environmental factors was stressed” (p. 7). In 1975, the
Austin Conference was sponsored by the University of Texas
at Austin and NIMH to “critically assess the many problems
facing community psychology and to examine community
psychology’s conceptual independence from both clinical
psychology and community mental health” (Iscoe, 1975,
p. 1193). The planning committee of Iscoe, Bernard Bloom,
Charles Spielberger, and Brian Wilcox invited 139 partici-
pants with an emphasis on recruiting new PhD’s and ethnic
minority psychologists (Iscoe, Bloom, & Spielberger, 1977).
Again the field was hearing the call to address the lack of
innovation in contextual analysis.Ecological AssessmentThough discontent within the field around its insistent preoc-
cupation with individual-oriented variables was expressed,
several notable scholars at the time paved the way to assess-
ing contextual variables. In the 1970s, Rudolph Moos and
Edison Trickett were among the first to develop methodolo-
gies for assessing context with the “environment scales.”
Various forms of this scale have been developed to assess the
perceived climate of different environments such as class-
rooms (Trickett & Quinlan, 1979), family environments
(Moos, 1974; Moos & Moos, 1984), work settings (Moos,
1974), and group settings (Moos, 1974). The valuable work
of Moos and his colleagues made explicit the role of the en-
vironment in the study of behaviors of individuals. Though
Moos and Lemke (1996) later expanded the conceptualiza-
tion of environmental assessment, a critique of this approach