Development and Psychopathology, 15 (2003), 613640

Copyright 2003 Cambridge University Press

Printed in the United States of America
DOI: 10.1017.S0954579403000312

Research strategies for capturing

transactional models of development:
The limits of the possible

ARNOLD J. SAMEROFF

AND

MICHAEL J. MACKENZIE

University of Michigan

Abstract
Transactional models have informed research design and interpretation in studies relevant to developmental
psychopathology. Bidirectional effects between individuals and social contexts have been found in many behavioral
and cognitive domains. This review will highlight representative studies where the transactional model has been
explicitly or implicitly tested. These studies include experimental, quasiexperimental, and naturalistic designs.
Extensions of the transactional model have been made to interventions designed to target different aspects of a
bidirectional system in efforts to improve developmental outcomes. Problems remain in the need to theoretically
specify structural models and to combine analyses of transactions in the parentchild relationship with transactions
in the broader social contexts. Longitudinal studies with sufficient time points to assess reciprocal processes
continue to be important. Such longitudinal investigations will permit identifying developmental periods where the
child or the context may be most influential or most open to change.

Theres a reason that physicists are so successful with what they do, and that is that they
study the hydrogen atom and the helium atom
and then they stop. This statement attributed
to Richard Feynman (Krauss, 2002) sets a low
expectation for the amount of complexity that
scientists can hope to explain in the field of
developmental psychopathology. In physics,
laws are derived that apply to every unit in a
group, based on the simple assumption that all
of the units are identical. All electrons are the
same. In developmental psychopathology, laws
are derived that apply to no one individual
unit in the group. People are all different. In
physics, there are laws such as E = mc2 that
are thought to capture the true underlying re-

This work was partially supported by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health.
Address correspondence and reprint requests to: Arnold Sameroff, PhD, Center for Human Growth and Development, 300 N. Ingalls Building, 10th Level, Ann
Arbor, MI 48109-0406; E-mail: sameroff@umich.edu.

ality of a relation, such as between energy and

mass. In developmental psychopathology, there
are principles or approaches or models that
characterize relations between processes or characteristics but do not in themselves explain
any of the variance. Such an approach is the
transactional model (Sameroff, 1975; Sameroff & Chandler, 1975).
The goals of developmental psychopathology are to understand the processes that lead
to developmental success or dysfunction. This
understanding requires explanations of continuity and discontinuity between adapted and
maladapted individuals and between states of
adaptation and maladaptation within individuals across time (Sameroff, 2000). One theme
in developmental psychopathology is the need
to understand these outcomes as residing, not
in the individual, but in the adaptiveness of
the relationship between individual and context (Sameroff & Emde, 1989). A requirement
of such an understanding is a model of both
individual and context. All too often, however,

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that model has been missing. In a critique of

developmental research, Sigel and Parke (1987)
proposed deliberately separating structure from
content in the design of studies of social interaction. By focusing on the structure of the study,
the relations being investigated, one could have
a better understanding of the content issues,
whether they be the beliefs or behaviors of child
or parent. Sigel and Parke described structural
models of research that ranged from simple
noninteractive models, where only the behavior of one partner is studied, to unidirectional
models, where one partners effect on the other
is assessed; dyadic bidirectional models of mutual influence; and then triadic and family level
models, where arrows seem to proliferate exponentially. They concluded that paying attention to structural models of relationships is
as important as focusing on the contents of
relationships.
Transactional Model
An instance of a particular analytic structure
is the transactional model in which the development of any process in the individual is influenced by an interplay with the individuals
context. In this approach, developmental outcomes are neither a function of the individual
alone nor a function of the experiential context alone. Outcomes are a product of the combination of an individual and his or her experience. To predict outcome, a singular focus on
the characteristics of the individual, in this case
the child, will frequently be misleading. An analysis and assessment of the experiences available to the child needs to be added.
The development of the child is a product
of the continuous dynamic interactions of the
child and the experience provided by his or
her family and social context. What is central
to the transactional model is the equal emphasis placed on the bidirectional effects of the child
and of the environment. Experiences provided
by the environment are not viewed as independent of the child.
For developmental psychopathology a concern with the transactional model is of more
than academic interest. Our concern with improving the lives of children and their families
requires a clear idea of where those improve-

A. J. Sameroff and M. J. MacKenzie

ments are best directed. Too often these efforts have suffered for lack of an adequate developmental model. The research reviewed
here should give a sense of how social interactions have been conceptualized, operationalized, and studied within a transactional framework and what we can expect in the future.
However, major barriers remain to the empirical entry into a transactional system. These
obstacles are theoretical (assessing a dynamic
system); logistic, (developing longitudinal studies with enough time points and large enough
samples); and methodological, (assessing multiple interacting domains over time in order to
identify points of qualitative change).
Dialectics
Even when using a defined structural model,
the usual employment of the transactional model
in relation to child development is descriptive
rather than theoretical. Research using the model
attempts to find situations in which the childs
behavior changes the caregivers expectations
and behavior and is in turn changed by the
changed caregiver. In this sense the model is
falsifiable (Popper, 1959). The researcher tries
to determine whether the directional change
in both partners occurs. However, the transactional model has also been embedded in a theory that claims that all relations between subject and object or individual and context are
mutually constitutive, which may not be falsifiable. This aspect of the transactional model
emerges from a major theoretical stream coupling individual and context in a relation fostering cognitive and socialemotional development. This flow runs from philosophers like
Hegel (1910) and Marx (1912) to pioneers in
developmental science like Vygotsky (1962)
and Piaget (1952) who emphasized the active
role of the knower in creating knowledge
through contradictions between knowing and
the known. The dialectical core of the process
was transactional in that the child was changed
by experience and experience was changed by
the childs more complex understandings.
The exceptional within the universal
Although these dialectical and transactional
processes apply to all domains of development,

Transactional models

our interest in developmental psychopathology

will focus on areas of social and emotional
functioning that characterize mental health
and illness. For infants with a variety of perceptual and cognitive deficits, the experience
of social relationships will be exceptional.
However, here one of the key issues in developmental psychopathology comes into play:
the continuitydiscontinuity question (Sameroff, 2000). Are differences in the childs or
caregivers behavior quantitative or qualitative? For the anencephalic child with no cortex, there is no psychological world; but does
a deaf or blind child have a qualitatively or
quantitatively different experience of reality?
Clearly, if the analysis is restricted to the deviant modality (hearing or sight), there is a
qualitative difference; but if the analysis is
broadened, we find that children with either
sensory loss gain an appreciation of objects
and relationships in the world through the use
of other senses, which is an example of developmental equifinality (Cicchetti, 1993).
On the experience side, we find the same
issues. There are qualitative deficits in caregiving such as infanticide or starvation to which
children cannot adapt; but there are other extreme variations, such as the absence of touch
or positive affective expression, that the child
would survive. The developmental question is
to determine the varieties of adaptation that
occur. Would such experiences produce a social isolate, or would there be alternative modalities of social experience that would still
permit an integration into the individuals
family or culture?
In our review of research directed at examining transactional processes, we will identify
the limitations of experimental research in
studying such deviances in child or context.
We cannot assign individuals to be handicapped or caregivers to be abusive, but through
quasiexperimental designs and natural experiments, some understanding of the effects of
abnormality in either child or context can be
obtained.
Bidirectional models
The descriptive aspect of the transactional
model emerged from the pioneering tempera-

615

ment research of Thomas, Chess, Birch, Hertzig and Korn (1963) and Bells (1968) reinterpretation of direction of effects research. Both
efforts were to counter what Chess (1964) labeled the mal de me`re orientations of psychoanalytic and behavioral theories that parenting
caused child behavior and, more explicitly, that
bad mothering caused bad children. Bell showed
that many parent behaviors were not emitted
in the service of socializing the child but
rather were elicited by the childs characteristics and behavior. Thomas, Chess, and Birch
(1968) elucidated a clear transactional developmental path for a subset of children with
difficult temperaments. These children stimulated maladaptive parenting that led to their
later behavioral disturbance. For children who
did not have this transaction occur (whose parents were not negatively reactive to the temperaments of their children), no such pathway
to behavioral deviance was found.
Building on these descriptive studies of
parentchild relationships, Sameroff and Chandler (1975) proposed that transactional processes
had to be considered as central to developmental theory. Children were seen as engaged
in active organization and reorganization so
that constants could not be found in a set of
traits; rather, they were found in the processes
by which these traits were maintained by the
relationship between children and their experience in a variety of social settings. Bell and
Harper (1977) found it logically compelling
that if parents are effective, they must be affected by the products of their tutelage (p. 55).
In other contemporary domains of psychology,
Banduras (1978) work on reciprocal determinism and Bernes earlier (1961) clinical formulations used the transaction concept to describe similar dynamic aspects of interpersonal
behavior.
These early views have become central to
current models of regulation and self-regulation that are permeating the developmental literature (cf. Boekaerts, Pintrich, & Zeidner, 2000;
Bradley, 2000). The individual is seen not only
as having a major role in modifying social experience through both eliciting and selecting
processes, but also as having a major role in
modifying biological experience through both
stress reactions and medication (Cicchetti &

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Tucker, 1994). These regulations occur on the

biopsychosocial interfaces of human functioning.
The biological revolution that has captured
the imagination of both scientists and the public has been framed as the search for genes that
cause the biological and even psychological ills
of society. In that search process, however, the
real revolution is the massive discoveries about
the complexity of biological functioning, especially the complexity of interactions between
each level of functioning from the gene to the
whole organism (Gottlieb, 1991). The appreciation of complexity in psychological development is less of an outlier when the same complexity is found at what are considered to be
more fundamental levels.
Contemporary reconceptualizations of temperament have been part of these advances.
Instead of conceptualizing temperament as a
set of traits inherent in the child, it is seen as
a set of individual differences in the way children regulate experience (Rothbart & Bates,
1998). This view makes temperament a relational construct rather than a personal one.
Another area that illustrates the child contribution to transactional pathways involves the
maltreatment of children living under the care
and supervision of the child welfare system.
In theory, upon removal from an abusive situation, children should go on to more positive
outcomes. Unfortunately, this does not seem
to be universally true in that some are maltreated by later caretakers including foster parents (Milowe, Lourie, & Parrott, 1964). Something seems to be different in these children
that is carried forward into new relationships.
Children who are maltreated while in care
seem to have higher rates of prior maltreatment than children who do not go on to be
maltreated in care (Benedict, Zuravin, Somerfield, & Brandt, 1996). The changes wrought
in these children by the maltreatment experience move forward in time, influencing their
future relationships.
Positive and negative feedback
Regulation typically involves negative feedback systems that restore a homeostatic setpoint. Sensitive parentchild interactions can
be seen as deviation reducing when the goal

A. J. Sameroff and M. J. MacKenzie

of the caregiver is to have an optimal interactive partner. The optimal partner is awake and
attentive, but some children may be below
(e.g., drowsy or inattentive) or above this setpoint (e.g., distressed or overactive). The caregiver in the first case would use behaviors designed to arouse and focus the child, whereas
in the second case the strategies would be designed to soothe and settle the child. Bell and
Harper (1977) labeled these as lower and upper limit control reactions. Reducing the deviation between actual and desired responsivity
will take different forms, depending on the
starting point of the interaction; but this limit
setting can be extended over longer periods of
interaction.
Interactive systems can also be deviation
amplifying, using positive feedback to move
away from a set-point. This amplification can
be intended or unintended. For example, observations comparing fatherchild and mother
child interaction sequences (Parke, Cassidy,
Burks, Carson, & Boyum, 1992) have found
that fathers frequently engage in play behaviors aimed at making the child more excited.
These amplifying interactions ultimately reach
a limit, and the fathers stimulating behavior
is reduced to bring the child to a more settled
state. This intended amplification can be contrasted to the unintended consequences of inept parental responses to child aggression as
found in the work of Patterson and colleagues
(Patterson, 1986; Patterson & Bank, 1989).
When the higher or lower level of stimulation becomes a consistent pattern, the system
changes and the consequences are qualitative
rather than quantitative differences. Two such
examples are the Pygmalion and Matthew effects named after Greek and Christian religious figures, respectively. The Pygmalion effect was proposed by Rosenthal and Jacobson
(1968) as a way of raising childrens IQs by
raising teachers expectations about them. The
transaction began from outside the interaction
system when teachers were provided with information that randomly selected students had
high potential. The teachers changed beliefs
changed their behavior, and the IQ of the
selected students increased. Although the
Pygmalion effect is controversial (Spitz, 1999),
meta-analyses have confirmed it with the quali-

Transactional models

fication that the less the teachers knew about

the children before the attempt to change their
attitudes, the larger was the effect (Raudenbush, 1984).
Derived from the statement in the gospels,
To the man who has, more will be given until he grows rich; the man who has not will
lose what little he has (Matthew 13:12), the
Matthew effect is a clear example of a deviation amplifying process in which small differences early in development diverge through
positive feedback mechanisms into later larger
differences (Walberg & Tsai, 1983). The Matthew effect model was first applied to child
development by Stanovich (1986) to provide
a theoretical framework for the study and explanation of individual differences in reading
ability, whereby better readers get further ahead
and those who are behind at an early point become increasingly so (Bast & Reitsma, 1998).
Starting in kindergarten, with small differences in letter recognition between high and
low ability children, there was a sharp divergence as the children who were ahead became
increasingly more advanced and those who
were behind became increasingly delayed. In
a related study, Ma (1999) not only found evidence for the fan-spread phenomenon among
students within schools but also found it between different schools. Small differences between high and low performing schools in the
earlier grades tended to increase over time.
Statistical operationalization
Although the transactional model originates
from a strongly dialectic, organismic orientation, any operationalization requires a mechanistic measurement model, in which dynamic
processes are reduced to static scores that can
then be entered into statistical analyses. The
simplest of these is a two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and a good theory. If the theory is that infants with difficult temperament
who evoke negative reactions in their parents
will have more negative outcomes (Thomas et
al., 1968), then one can dichotomize infants into
difficult versus nondifficult temperament and
dichotomize parents into negative reactors and
nonnegative reactors and test for a statistical
interaction effect on the outcome. Although this

617

once seemed a simplistic approach, it fits well

with the person-oriented methods that are becoming more common in developmental research (Magnusson & Bergman, 1984, 1990).
As opposed to variable-oriented approaches,
the questions for person-oriented approaches
are about individuals rather than characteristics of individuals.
Theoretically and operationally, transactions
need to be separated from interactions. Interactions are documented by finding dependencies in which the activity of one element is correlated with the activity of another, for example,
when a smile is reciprocated by a smile, which
elicits further smiling, and the correlations are
stable over time. Transactions are documented
where the activity of one element changes the
usual activity of another, either quantitatively,
by increasing or decreasing the level of the
usual response, or qualitatively, by eliciting or
initiating a new response, for example, when
a smile is reciprocated by a frown, which may
elicit confusion, negativity, or even increased
anxious positivity. This is especially confusing when one statistical test of a transaction
is to find a statistical interaction.
Since 1975, advances in statistical methodology, and especially the ease of use of computer statistical packages for doing regression
analyses, have moved toward more sophisticated approaches that can utilize more information in continuous distributions. Methodological advances were given theoretical significance
with the publication of Baron and Kennys
(1986) article on the distinction between moderator and mediator effects and how to use
regression analyses to find them. These authors
were concerned that intervening third variables
between a predictor and outcome had been
lumped into a general category with the two
constructs being used indiscriminately. Analyses of transactional processes generally had
sought a mediating variable in the social context that explained the relation between the
childs condition at two points in time. Such
analyses may be important for understanding
developmental progress but less so for understanding transactions. Transactions generally
require a moderator analysis, for example, the
quality or quantity of the parental response
changes the relation between the childs ear-

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lier and later behavior. The regression techniques for testing the interplay between child
and context are essentially an extension of the
two-way ANOVA model. In the regression
model, the significance of a Parent Negative
Reactivity Infant Temperament interaction
variable is tested while controlling for the separate effects of temperament and reactivity on
child outcomes. These regression models have
been enlarged to incorporate a variety of mediators and moderators with a rapid proliferation of causal arrows. Simple regression paths
have been subsumed in the general area of
structural equation modeling, again following
the technical advances in computer statistical
programs since the advent of LISREL (Joreskog & Sorbom, 1984).
Baron and Kenny (1986) suggest that the
choice between a mediator and moderator
analysis should be based on whether the relation between the primary predictor and criterion variables is stronger or weaker. If there
is a strong relation, then mediator analyses are
recommended, but if there is an unexpected
weak or inconsistent relation, the recommendation is to seek a moderator. In terms of our
example, if the relation between temperament
and mental health were mediated, then there
would be a high correlation between temperament and behavior problems and all children
with difficult temperaments would have worse
outcomes than all children with easy temperaments because all parents would react negatively to infant difficulty and positively to infant easiness.
In contrast, in moderated relations a number of different pathways can be taken. In our
example, there is a weak correlation between
temperament and later mental health, meaning
that a sizable number of infants with easy temperaments could have bad outcomes and a sizable number of infants with difficult temperaments could have good outcomes. In the
Thomas et al. (1968) study, 10% of the sample had difficult temperaments and represented 25% of the children with later behavioral problems. But 30% of the difficult infants
did not have behavior problems, and of the
children who did have behavior problems, 75%
had not had difficult temperaments. Use of a
transactional model forces an a priori, rather

A. J. Sameroff and M. J. MacKenzie

than an a posteriori, decision to use a moderator statistical test. If the hypothesis is that the
relation between an earlier and later state of
the infant is determined by the nature of the
response of parents or other social agents, then
one must examine the differential impact of
different caregiving responses.
Some investigators attempt to finesse the
moderator analysis by preselecting either infants or parents in one category or another (usually a high-risk group). Again using our example, if only difficult infants are included in the
sample, then parental reactivity would be linearly related to outcome and a mediator test
would be sufficient. However, one would not
be able to generalize to nondifficult infants
because there is no way to know if parent reactivity is linearly related or unrelated to child
outcome without examining the relation in the
rest of the population.
Although Baron and Kenny (1986) went a
long way toward resolving the definitional
ambiguity surrounding mediating and moderating variables, there remained a need for clear
operational definitions that could eliminate
barriers to application specifically in the area
of risk research and developmental psychopathology (Hinshaw, 2002). Recent efforts have been
made to expand on the mediator and moderator work toward increasing our understanding
of how multiple risks operate together (Kraemer,
Stice, Kazdin, Offord, & Kupfer, 2001), especially with regard to intervention trials (Kraemer,
Wilson, Fairburn, & Agras, 2002). Cicchetti
and Hinshaw (2002a) see these efforts as necessary in order to bring clinical treatment research into the realm of exploratory research
to inform causal processes and basic developmental theory.
To this end, Kraemer et al. (2001, 2002)
provided an alternative perspective using a stepwise approach for identifying the different ways
in which two risk factors can work together
to affect a particular binary or dimensional
outcome to differentiate between a moderator
and a mediator. Moderators were conceptualized as useful in addressing a central question
of clinical treatment by identifying on whom
and under what circumstances interventions
have different effects, whereas mediators identify the mechanisms linking treatment and out-

Transactional models

come (Kraemer et al., 2002). What sets their

framework apart from the conceptual work of
Baron and Kenny (1986) is the emphasis on
temporal precedence and association with treatment. A moderator variable, as defined by
Kraemer and colleagues (2002), must precede
treatment and random assignment. A mediator
variable, on the other hand, occurs after random assignment and has its effect during the
intervention. The temporal placement also impacts the association of the variable of interest
with treatment. Because potential moderators,
such as gender or socioeconomic status, are
identified and measured prior to randomization, they are not correlated with treatment assignment. In contrast, mediators, which are
active during the intervention and point to the
underlying causal processes, are associated
with assignment to the treatment group (Kraemer
et al., 2002).
Testing the Transactional Model
In the nearly three decades since Sameroff
and Chandler (1975) first articulated the transactional model, it has been referenced extensively in the developmental literature and rated
as 1 of the 20 studies that revolutionized child
psychology (Dixon, 2002). All too often, however, it is used to emphasize a linear environmentalism at the expense of the more complex interplay between dynamic systems. The
perceived methodological difficulty inherent
in elucidating reciprocal pathways has resulted in limited empirical evidence (Lynch &
Cicchetti, 1998). These issues include determining the appropriate time interval in longitudinal studies, deciding whether to attend to
behavior or cognitive representations of the
participants, and determining the different influences that may be active at each point in
the development of the process of concern. Is
the concern with microanalysis of real time
contingent interactions or macroanalysis of
influences at one stage of development on
processes in a later stage? Is the concern with
changes in behavior or changes in attitudes,
beliefs, or representations, which may or may
not be expressed in behavior? Is the concern
with processes that induce, facilitate, or maintain a change in behavior or representations?

619

Despite these problems, some researchers

have taken up the challenge, and there are
growing bodies of research in several developmental domains that have set about testing
transactional models and disentangling complex bidirectional processes. What follows is
an overview of some of these research efforts
and the effectiveness of four different types
of strategies employed to test bidirectional effects. First, we will discuss examples of both
explicit and implicit testing of transactional
models. The selected studies range from normative developmental processes through the
life span, to examples of direct relevance to
developmental psychopathology, such as pathways to aggression, substance abuse problems, and depression. Second, our focus will
turn to research strategies that attempt to gain
a point of entry into circular processes through
the manipulation of one of the variables. Examples include labeling experiments and the
training of child confederates in order to tease
apart the impact of actual child behavior and
the influence of adult beliefs and attitudes on
interactions and downstream outcomes. Third,
we provide a discussion of natural experiment
strategies when true experimental designs are
not available to the researcher. Although such
experiments bring with them clear limitations,
several researchers have been able to capitalize on such opportunities and make substantial contributions to our knowledge of reciprocal influences across time. The last area to be
covered involves the capacity for intervention
studies to inform our understanding of transactional effects (see Cicchetti & Hinshaw,
2002b). The implementation of intervention
programs aimed at either the child or the parent, which show later effects in the behavior
of the other, provide strong evidence for transactional processes. In a similar fashion to the
manipulation designs, intervention studies provide a starting point from which one can observe the transactional processes that play out
over time.
Explicit and implicit research strategies
Bells (1968) reinterpretation of the direction
of effects in studies of child development, drawing attention to the contributions made by the

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behavior and characteristics of the child, was

an important first step in qualifying socialization models where parent and culture linearly
determined child behavior. The second step was
realizing that new emphases on child effects did
not provide a complete picture unless they were
spelled out over time in a model of reciprocal
influences. Certain of the studies to be presented represent the results of explicit efforts
to look for bidirectional influences and test transactional models; others were less direct in their
approach but nonetheless provide implicit evidence for transactional processes in their findings. Examples range from the formation of
the infantcaregiver relationship through to
the impact of the home environment and parenting practices on school performance.
Reciprocal influences in early development.
Evidence of transactional processes can be
found at all points in development. Some of
the earliest involve the establishment of the
unique infantcaregiver attachment relationship.
Attachment theorists (Sroufe, Carlson, Levy,
& Egeland, 1999) have argued that the quality
of this relationship has great implications for
subsequent events, while at the same time being intimately tied to events of the past.
In an investigation of the development of
secure infantmother attachment relationships
over the first year of life, Crockenberg (1981)
examined the influences of both child and mother characteristics. These included infant irritability assessed during the neonatal period and
maternal responsiveness assessed when the infant was 3 months of age. In analyzing the importance of social support to the process, they
found it to be the best predictor of the presence of a secure attachment at 12 months of age.
Moreover, they found a statistical interaction
with social support that was most important
for mothers with irritable babies. Reduced social support seemed to increase maternal unresponsiveness, which was associated with infant resistance during reunion episodes of the
strange situation. These findings point to bidirectional pathways whereby irritable infants are
more likely to develop insecure attachment relationships as a result of the unresponsive mothering that is characteristic of contexts that offer
limited social support. Crockenberg (1981) con-

A. J. Sameroff and M. J. MacKenzie

cluded that these findings are best understood

from a transactional perspective, including an
appreciation for the role played by the child
in eliciting particular patterns of interactions
or in determining the effect of certain mother
behaviors on subsequent development (p. 858).
Examples of the impact of maternal beliefs
and preferences on downstream child functioning come from work on the preference of mothers for one twin versus the other (Minde, Corter, Goldberg, & Jeffers, 1990). Most mothers
came to prefer one of the twins as early as
the first 2 weeks after birth. These preferences
tended to be stable, lasting for at least the 4
years during which the families were followed
in the study. The particular aspect of the child
triggering the transaction varied, with some
mothers preferring the temperamentally easier
and healthier children and others preferring
the more strong-willed or sickly of the twin
pair. Whichever child characteristic triggered
the maternal preference, the preferred twins
had higher scores on the Bayley scales at 12
months of age and on the Stanford Binet at
age 4 and fewer behavior problems at 4. Minde
et al. (1990) were able to use this twin study
design to highlight the transactional nature of
socialization processes through an examination of the extent to which maternal attributions about their infants lead to differential responsiveness, which then serves to affect later
child outcomes in ways that confirm and solidify their initial preferences.
Beyond early childhood, transactional processes continue to play themselves out in the
childs ever widening social context. Focusing
on a specific population of slow-learning adolescents, Nihira, Mink, and Meyers (1985) examined the reciprocal influence of the child
and the home environment on child social competence, psychological adjustment, and selfconcept. This 3-year longitudinal study was
designed to determine whether a high quality
home environment produces competent and
high functioning children or if more competent children elicit better parenting. Evidence
was found to support both of these competing hypotheses in a transactional developmental sequence. Cognitive and social environmental stimulation in the home influences
the adolescents subsequent outcomes and ad-

Transactional models

olescent functioning produced changes in the

home environment. Finding reciprocal processes
highlights the importance of including an analysis of both child and environmental effects
and the need for longitudinal strategies to
flesh out the bidirectional pathways over time.
Pomerantz and Eaton (2001) also employed
such a longitudinal strategy in their exploration of potential transactional processes involving child academic achievement and maternal intrusive support. The core concern of
this study involved the mechanism(s) by which
problems in childrens academic achievement
elicit reactions from their parents and whether
these parental responses serve to amplify or
constrain the childs behavior. A model was
proposed whereby low child achievement leads
to maternal worry and child uncertainty, both
of which contribute to maternal intrusive support, impacting later child achievement. The
hypotheses were tested using a three wave
longitudinal design over an 18-month period
for children in Grades 46. In addition to the
more long-term analysis, Pomerantz and Eaton (2001) utilized hierarchical linear modeling to perform a day to day sequential analysis to determine how mothers react to their
childrens daily academic failure and success.
They hypothesized that mothers would increase
their use of intrusive support following failure
and decrease their use following success. Support was found for the model, suggesting that
childrens low achievement indicates the need
for increased intrusive-support practices on the
part of the mother because of increased maternal worrying and child uncertainty. In a constraining negative feedback process, the heightened intrusive support led to improvements in
child academic achievement 6 months later.
Similar results were found in the day to day
analysis, in which intrusive support in response
to child failure resulted in improved performance in the following days and a decrease in
reliance on intrusive support. Their study
moved beyond simply stating that children and
parents both play contributing roles in development to attain a more detailed understanding of
the actual transactional processes involved.
Bidirectional socialization effects involving
shyness and social withdrawal. Studies have

621

addressed transactional processes in the area

of child shyness, anxiety, and social withdrawal.
In an investigation of the transaction between
parents perceptions of their childrens social
wariness/inhibition and their parenting styles,
Rubin, Nelson, Hastings, and Asendorpf (1999)
explored the direction of influence between
childrens shyness and their parents attitudes
regarding socialization practices. A longitudinal design was used in which questionnaires
dealing with child temperament and parenting
practices were distributed to parents when their
children were 2 and 4 years old and observations of child inhibition were made at the initial 2-year-old assessment; parental perceptions of their childrens shyness at age 2 were
found to be stable and predicted discouragement of independence at age 4, but they were
unrelated to observed shyness at 4.
LaFreniere and Dumas (1992) used a transactional analysis of early childhood anxiety and
social withdrawal to account for bidirectional
contributions. Preschool children were classified into three groups; socially competent, average, and anxiouswithdrawn based on the
ratings of their preschool teachers. Mother
child dyads were then observed during a problem-solving task to determine the extent to
which the dyads responded contingently to
each others behavior and affective displays
were assessed. The mothers of the socially competent children were more contingent, displayed more positive affect and behaviors,
and exhibited more coherent discipline strategies, whereas the mothers of anxiouswithdrawn children engaged in high levels of negative reciprocity. Even though the children
were placed into the three categories based on
the ratings of their preschool teachers, these
categories were strongly associated with maternal behavior. LaFreniere and Dumas (1992)
conclude that through a transactional process
a prior disturbance in the childparent relationship becomes internalized and carried forward by the child into subsequent interactions, where teachers and peers then perceive
him or her as less competent.
Cycles of coercion in the development of aggression. The work of Gerald Patterson and
colleagues on aggressive behavior in children

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represents perhaps the most theoretically and

empirically well-developed example we have
to date of transactional processes in developmental psychopathology. Patterson (1982) hypothesized that the etiology of antisocial behavior has its roots in family interactions and
the cycle of behavioral responses of one family member to another over time. Patterson
used structural equation modeling to examine
what he calls cycles of coercion, in which inept parenting skills trigger a process that results in an antisocial child who is rejected by
healthy peers, struggles academically, and is
left with low self-esteem. Early failures in effective disciplining of minor child coercive
behaviors leads to reciprocal exchanges in
which the child and his or her parents and siblings become increasingly aversive. What may
start as developmentally appropriate noncompliance on the part of the young child predictably escalates to physical aggression. Patterson
proposed that families characterized by unskilled parents, a child with a difficult temperament, and the presence of stressors at multiple
levels of the ecology were at greater risk for
the initiation of coercive cycles. The escalating
transactional nature of this positive feedback
loop is best illustrated by Pattersons (1986)
own words, What leads to things getting out
of hand may be a relatively simple affair,
whereas the process itself, once initiated, may
be the stuff of which novels are made (p. 442).
Although holding that the initiation of the
coercive cycle begins with a failure of the parent to maintain child compliance, Patterson
and Bank (1989) recognize that there may be
reasons for onset of inept discipline practices
that lie outside of the parent. There is a clear
impact of ecological stress on the parents capacity for effectively disciplining their child,
and the possibility exists that the childs contributions such as difficult temperament may
tax the limits of the parents capacities. The
maintenance of the coercive cycle is attributable to dynamic escalations among the interacting partners, which serve to reciprocally
change behaviors; this makes the child more
difficult to discipline effectively, further taxing the parents and making them more rejecting, and leading to more physical and violent
forms of coercion being exhibited by both child

A. J. Sameroff and M. J. MacKenzie

and parent (Patterson & Bank, 1989). The

changed child will then enter into similar cycles of negative reinforcement over time with
siblings and eventually with teachers and
peers outside of the family context. These contingencies serve to maintain and amplify the
childs antisocial behavior. However, these
processes are not always amplifying. In a constraining process, parents with a greater capacity for effective discipline (a moderator
variable) are able to respond to early mildly
coercive child behavior in a consistent and
predictable nonharsh manner, leading to a decrease in the negative child behavior and a
return to adaptive functioning.
Anderson, Lytton, and Romney (1986) examined the issue of child contributions to the
initiation of coercive cycles in some depth.
They utilized a design that compared the reactions of mothers of conduct disordered and
normal boys to their own children and to nonfamiliar children who were either conduct disordered or normal. Both groups of mothers
were more negative with conduct disordered
children than they were with nondisordered
children. The conduct disordered children were
less compliant, independent of the type of mother they were interacting with. The authors concluded that the childs behavior is the major
influence in conduct disorder. There was evidence of transactional effects, however, in
that mothers of conduct disordered children
exhibited more negative affect with their own
children than with nonfamiliar conduct disordered children, pointing to the importance of
past relationship history and to expectations
and behavior. Although the data from this
study were interpreted as implicating child
characteristics as primary, it must be noted
that the children in the study were 611 years
of age by which point the coercive cycles outlined by Patterson and colleagues (Patterson,
1982; Patterson & Bank, 1989) may already
be firmly entrenched.
Reciprocal amplifying processes involving
aggression and negativity continue as children
move through school and into adulthood (Kim,
Conger, Lorenz, & Elder, 2001; Stoolmiller,
2001). Their relationships, initially restricted
to the family, broaden to include peers and
eventually intimate romantic relationships. Ca-

Transactional models

paldi, Dishion, Stoolmiller, and Yoerger (2001)

elucidated the mechanism by which young
men become aggressive toward female partners. The authors proposed that parenting was
important to early socialization and the selection of the peer group in adolescence. The peer
group then takes on an important socializing
role and, in a path-dependent fashion, further
locks an individual into the trajectory started
with the earlier family relationships. Capaldi
et al. (2001) believe that this normative trajectory is important for the establishment of a
romantic relationship, which eventually completes the cycle by providing the context for
parenting the next generation. On the negative
side, they found a transactional pathway
whereby boys antisocial behavior in early adolescence was associated with subsequent deviant peer associations in middle adolescence,
which, in turn, was prospectively associated
with hostile talk about women in late adolescence. The acceptance and reinforcement of
hostile talk and attitudes about women in the
late adolescent peer group was predictive of
physical aggression toward a female partner
in young adulthood.
Pathways to substance use problems. There is
good reason to believe that the onset of substance use and abuse may follow a transactional socialization process similar to the one
outlined by Patterson and others for aggression and conduct problems. Recognizing that
these two problems are often found to co-occur
during adolescence, Stice and Barrera (1995)
examined the transactional influences between
parenting and adolescents problem behaviors.
Strong support was found for a transactional
pathway, starting with an association between
deficits in both parenting support and control
and subsequent adolescent substance use. In
turn, adolescent substance use was related to
subsequent decreases in the levels of parental
support and control.
Brody and Ge (2001) tested a transactional
model involving parenting practices, adolescent self-regulation, psychological functioning,
and alcohol use outcomes. Evidence was found
to support two transactional models. In the
first model, child self-regulation at 12 years
was found to be prospectively related to con-

623

flicted and harsh parenting at 13 years, which

in turn was related to subsequent depression,
hostility, and self-esteem at 14 years. The second model was similar except that, rather than
psychological functioning, it involved alcohol
use, negative consequences, and symptomatic
drinking.
As youth move into late adolescence it
would be expected that the influence of peers
would begin to gain prominence. The earlier
parentchild relationship experiences undoubtedly influence the quality of future peer interactions, but entirely new socialization mechanisms are introduced as those peer relationships
become more firmly established during adolescence. Facing these sorts of questions, Dishion and Owen (2002) picked up where Brody
and colleagues left off and carried out an exploration of potential bidirectional influences
of peer relationships and substance use from
early adolescence through to young adulthood.
The results supported a transactional model,
as deviant friendship processes in early adolescence were related to subsequent substance
use in middle adolescence, which influenced
the selection of deviant friends in late adolescence. Deviant friendship processes in late adolescence, in turn, prospectively predicted higher
levels of substance use in young adulthood.
These findings underscore the deepening complexity of these transactional processes as development unfolds and aspects of the parent
child relationship become internalized and
carried forward into the childs ever widening
social world.
Psychopathology. Evidence for transactional
models of development can also be found in
other areas of developmental psychopathology
such as depression (Cicchetti & Schneider
Rosen, 1984, 1986). Potential models account
not only for the development and course of
the disorder in children but also for the impact
of psychopathology in a parent on the socialization process. An example of a study that
explored the latter was carried out by Hammen, Burge, and Stansbury (1990). They investigated the influence of both mother and
child characteristics on child outcomes in a
population of school-aged children with depressed mothers. The purpose of their study

624

was to move beyond the consistent linear finding that the children of mothers suffering from
depression are at risk for psychopathology to
an examination of the reciprocal influence of
mothers and children on each other. They found
evidence for a negative reciprocal influence,
where maternal functioning was related to subsequent child symptoms and dysfunction, and
child characteristics were in turn prospectively associated with maternal functioning.
Such a model fit with the authors expectations for an amplifying transactional process,
where, through a positive feedback process,
deviant child behavior, arising from earlier
maternal dysfunction, contributes to later maternal depressive symptomatology. There is
an escalation of dysfunction in the child and
the parent as these processes play out over time.
Relationship impairments may be expected
between boys diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and their
mothers. A transactional framework was used
to examine maternal responsiveness and child
characteristics in a population of 7- to 10year-old boys with ADHD (Johnston, Murray,
Hinshaw, Pelham, & Hoza, 2002). Maternal
responsiveness was negatively related to later
maternal depressive symptoms and child conduct problems. Child conduct problems were
related to later maternal responsiveness, but
no such association was found for child ADHD
symptoms. The design strategy employed by
Johnston et al. (2002) to assess reciprocal processes allowed them to begin to tease apart
the different factors involved and to disentangle issues of comorbidity. They speculated
that in a mutually enforcing process, maternal
depression leads to deficits in responsive parenting contributing to child conduct problems,
while at the same time child behavior that is
difficult to manage, such as ADHD, contributes to deficits in maternal responsiveness.
Experimental manipulations
There is great difficulty inherent in separating
the direction of effects in a natural setting.
The drive to better understand the bidirectional
influences focused researchers on experimental attempts to disentangle the contributions

A. J. Sameroff and M. J. MacKenzie

from both parent and child through the design

of experimental studies in which the characteristics or behavior of the child were manipulated in order to test the impact on adult behavior. Three such areas of research will serve
as examples. The first involves the use of
trained child confederates to examine the impact of child responsiveness on adults who
vary in their attributional style. The second
and third focus on the impact of experimentally assigned child labels on adult behavior,
either related to gender or infant prematurity.
Through controlling for characteristics of the
target child (in most cases, by using the same
child), the response of the adult to the labeled
child can be wholly attributed to the beliefs
that the adult holds regarding the label given
to the infant. However, as follow-up studies
began to look at subsequent child behavior
arising as a result of the influence of induced
adult beliefs on child interaction styles, the
transactional nature of these three processes
was revealed. All three areas involved testing
if parental beliefs about a child acted in a selffulfilling, positive feedback manner to influence interactions and elicit child behavior patterns that confirm and maintain those beliefs.
Bugentals attribution studies. Utilizing an elegant experimental manipulation design, Bugental and her colleagues explored the association of child responsiveness and controllability
with adult attribution and interaction styles. Initially, Bugental, Caporael, and Shennum (1980)
established the first component of a transactional relationship, demonstrating that child
behavior impacts adult attitudes and behaviors. They were interested in studying a moderating role for adult control attributions in
the relationship between child controllability
and adult assertiveness. The experimental design entailed the training of 7- to 9-year-old
boys to act as confederates who would interact with high or low internal control parents.
The children were trained to either be responsive or unresponsive while interacting with an
unfamiliar adult on a toy construction task.
The authors found a statistical interaction in
which unresponsiveness on the part of the
child confederates would impact only the be-

Transactional models

havior of adults with low internal control perceptions. These low power adults were less
assertive with unresponsive children.
Bugental and Shennum (1984) went on to
examine what impact the differential adult behavior had on subsequent child behavior. In
their landmark monograph they proposed and
found evidence for such a transactional process. Their second hypothesis, which is important to the transactional component, was that
these adult attributions would lead to a Rosenthal effect, whereby differential adult behavior would elicit child behavior that confirms
and maintains those attitudes and beliefs. Child
confederates were once again trained for their
responsiveness and assertiveness and placed
with unfamiliar mothers who differed on two
attributional domains: their self-perceived power
as caregivers and the social power they attributed to children (Bugental & Shennum, 1984).
Analysis of the videotaped interaction task
pointed to two separate transactional sequences.
On the one hand, mothers low on self-perceived
power responded to unresponsive children with
a communication style containing more negative affect and unassertive positive affect. In
turn, the unresponsive children reacted to the
low self-power mothers with continued unresponsiveness, staying in their assigned role
throughout the interaction. On the other hand,
mothers who were high in the social power
they attributed to children reacted to unassertive or shy children with a strong and affectively positive communication style. The unassertive children responded to this differential
action of the mothers with increased assertiveness, coming out of their assigned role as the
interaction progressed. The first sequence is
an example of a positive feedback process,
whereby a behavior or attribute of the child is
amplified through the transaction with an interactive partner. The second sequence, on the
other hand, is an example of a negative feedback process, in which the actions of the interactive partner leads to a decrease in the
behavior (unassertiveness) exhibited by the
child. Bugental and Shennum (1984) concluded that adults bring with them to the parenting role a set of beliefs about relationships
with children based on their history of social

625

experiences, which influence the interpretations the adult makes about a childs behavior, the subsequent behavioral responses of
the adult, and in a transactional fashion the
downstream behavior of the child. As we have
seen, this influence on later child behavior can
either be amplifying or constraining.
A series of studies followed these earlier
efforts, for the most part strongly supporting
the transactional process through which adult
attributions have their impact (e.g. Bugental,
1987). The specific questions of interest also
evolved to include investigations of transactional behavioral patterns with implications
for teacherchild relationships, interpersonal
violence, and child abuse (Bugental & Johnston, 2000; Bugental, Lewis, Lin, Lyon, & Kopeikin, 1999; Bugental, Lyon, Lin, McGrath, &
Bimbella, 1999). Katsurada and Sugawara
(2000) also applied this research strategy to
study the effect of maternal attributions on the
trajectory of aggressive behavior in their own
child and found that low power mothers exhibited more negative affect toward their children following noncompliance. The difference between low and high power mothers
only emerged when the child was aggressive,
and power attributions had no effect when the
child was not displaying aggression.
Gender labeling studies. Beginning with the
study of Baby X (Seavey, Katz, & Zalk,
1975), an extensive literature has emerged focusing on the effect of gender labels on the
response of adults to infants. An experimental
approach is required to determine if adult stereotypes and attitudes promote gender differences or if gender-specific differences in infant behavior elicit differential responses by
adults (Stern & Karraker, 1989). In the earliest study Seavey et al. (1975) observed adults
interacting with a neutrally clothed infant who
was introduced as a boy, as a girl, or with
no gender information given. Both male and
female adults were more likely to select gender-stereotyped toys for the infant if introduced as a girl. In the condition when no gender label was given, all adult subjects made
efforts to guess the gender of the child, which
were influenced by stereotyped behavior. For

626

instance, if the nonlabeled infant, who was in

reality a girl, exhibited some show of strength,
the adults would guess that the infant was a
boy and adjust their behavior accordingly. In
this manipulation design, differential adult behavioral responses to the infants on the basis
of the gender label can be seen as arising from
attitudes and beliefs rather than existing infant
gender differences (Stern & Karraker, 1989).
Further support for the gender stereotype
effect came from the work of Culp, Cook, and
Housley (1983) who also found that both mothers and fathers of young children interact differently with unfamiliar infants dependent on
assigned gender label and, in addition, that
parents were unaware of their differential treatment. In a similar vein, there was an interaction
with parent gender. Females responded more
quickly if a baby was labeled female rather
than male (Condry, Condry, & Pogatshnik,
1983), and both male and female adults use
different communication styles with gender
labeled infants (Pomerleau, Malcuit, Turgeon,
& Cossette, 1997). The consistent finding that
adults behave differently toward baby boys
and baby girls based on attitudes and stereotypes is an important step in unraveling a reciprocal socialization process. Adult gender
attitudes impact their interactional behavior in
a self-fulfilling fashion, through eliciting and
reinforcing behavior from the infant that serves
to confirm the adults initial expectations (Stern
& Karraker, 1989).
Investigations of a prematurity stereotype. An
area of study that has followed a similar trajectory as the gender labeling investigations
involves attempts to understand the impact of
an infant being labeled premature on subsequent adult behavior. Despite evidence that
actual observable early differences in premature and full-term infants decline over time,
there is a tendency of some mothers to continue to interact differently with premature infants (Barnard, Bee, & Hammond, 1984).
Stern and Hildebrandt (1984) showed adults
video footage of an infant who was labeled as
either being full-term or premature. They found
that unfamiliar infants who were labeled as
premature were rated more negatively by college students and mothers than were infants

A. J. Sameroff and M. J. MacKenzie

labeled as full term. The next logical step was

to determine if these adult stereotypes and
attitudes toward premature children would
impact their behavior during interactions. To
achieve this, Stern and Hildebrandt (1986) introduced adults to an actual unfamiliar infant,
either full term or premature. Once again, the
prematurity label was found to trigger stereotypical beliefs; infants labeled premature were
rated as smaller, less cute, and finer featured
and were liked less than infants labeled full
term. Moreover, the new study design also
highlighted the impact of those adult expectations and perception on subsequent interaction
patterns, as premature labeled infants were
touched less and given a more immature toy
to play with. To complete the sequence, Stern,
Karraker, Sopko, and Norman (2000) found
that the infants labeled as premature exhibited
less positive emotion in their interactions with
misinformed adults.
Stern and colleagues have also been involved in studies extending these labeling/stereotype strategies to depression stereotypes, which
have direct relevance for developmental psychopathology (Hart, Field, Stern, & Jones, 1997).
Depressed and nondepressed fathers viewed
videotapes of unfamiliar infants labeled as
normal or depressed. Both groups of fathers
rated infants labeled as normal higher on sociability, social behavior, and cognitive competence. A difference did occur when depressed
fathers rated their own infants lower on social
behavior, less cognitively competent, and
more vulnerable than did nondepressed fathers.
The elegance of these manipulation strategies is that the labeling of an unfamiliar infant
or the use of a trained confederate provides an
entry point into a process of circular causality,
allowing for an elucidation of transactional
pathways for processes that may otherwise be
difficult to untangle. By simply observing a
mother with her own infant, separating the
impact of actual differences in child behavior
from current or previous differential maternal
beliefs and behaviors can be a daunting task.
Through controlling the baseline characteristics of the child, either in regard to gender
or prematurity, the experimental manipulation
strategy makes it possible to see how the adults

Transactional models

expectations and perceptions influence and

guide subsequent adult behavior. The impact
of the adults actions on subsequent infant
behavior is also discernable using this technique, providing the opportunity to see how
these reciprocal processes play out over time.
Experimental manipulations have revealed
the operation of transactional processes in the
laboratory with contrived relationships. A corollary effort is necessary to determine how parents and children influence each other in real
relationships. What are the factors that lead
parents to have stereotypes on the one hand
and beliefs about their own and their childs
power on the other? Are there factors that
arise from the parents previous interactions
with the child, or are these the results of the
parents own experience of being reared as a
child? As Bugental and Shennum (1984) have
demonstrated, it is relatively easy to get a
school-age child to alter his or her behavior
as a confederate in an experiment, but is it
equally easy to get the child to change his or
her behavior at home? Parents and children
bring interactional histories to their present interactions, and these form the basis of being
both unable to make quick changes in their
behavior and being able to make quick changes
in their attributions. As noted in the meta-analyses of the Pygmalian studies (Raudenbush,
1984), more experience with the actual behavior of the child should reduce the effect of
labeling and stereotyping manipulations.
Naturalistic observations
and quasiexperimental designs
Although true experimental designs and labeling/manipulation studies provide the most effective means for elucidating transactional processes, in most cases such research strategies
are not available. In such cases it is sometimes
possible to take advantage of natural experiments or a quasiexperimental design to gain
insight into a developmental process (Cook &
Campbell, 1979), although there are clear limitations in the extent to which these techniques
can tease apart competing hypotheses involving reciprocal influences.
In this section we will discuss four areas
where researchers have grappled with these

627

methodological issues yet were able to make

important contributions to our understanding
of transactional developmental processes. The
first focuses on the impact of maltreatment on
child development through the comparison of
maltreated and nonmaltreated children. The
second involves attempts to elucidate the impact of early attachment relationships on later
preschool social competence. Touching on issues developed previously in the section on
the prematurity stereotype, the third area of research to be discussed addresses potential differences between preterm and full-term children. The final area focuses on the issue of
grade retention and an examination of the effectiveness of failing and holding students
back in school.
Child maltreatment as a natural experiment.
A substantial body of research aimed at increasing our understanding of the etiology and
sequelae of maltreatment has grown out of a
desire to protect both vulnerable children and
our society from the harmful consequences
associated with child abuse and neglect (Cicchetti, Toth, Bush, & Gillespie, 1988; Kotch,
Browne, Dufort, Winsor, & Catellier, 1999).
Maltreated children may in fact be viewed as
a sort of natural experiment (Bronfenbrenner,
1979; Shields, Ryan, & Cicchetti, 2001), which
can be useful for examining questions involving the normative emergence of academic,
emotional, and social competence. The extensive work of Cicchetti and colleagues at the
preschool and summer day camp of the Mount
Hope Family Center highlights the use of
such naturalistic settings in order to observe
childrens developing regulatory capacities and
patterns of social interaction (Shields et al.,
2001). Observations and study of children interacting in this day camp setting have allowed for comparisons of maltreated and nonmaltreated children on aspects of relationship
representations, emotion understanding, and
regulation, as well as interactive behavior and
acceptance or rejection by peers and teachers.
Shonk and Cicchetti (2001) were interested in
elucidating the pathway from maltreatment to
academic adjustment problems. They hypothesized and found that maltreated children would
exhibit deficits in academic engagement, so-

628

cial competencies, and ego resiliency and control, which would in turn negatively impact
the childrens adjustment at school. The authors demonstrated that the pathway from
maltreatment to academic adjustment problems was mediated by academic engagement,
and the pathway from maltreatment to externalizing and internalizing behavior problems
was mediated by social competencies and ego
resiliency.
Cicchetti and Lynch (1993) drew on the
work of Bronfenbrenner (1979) and Sameroff
and Chandler (1975) to propose a formal integration of an ecologicaltransactional model
in an attempt to grapple with the combined
influences of maltreatment and community violence on childrens developmental course.
They laid out a transactional model in which
the current ecological context impacts future
child functioning and current child functioning influences the organization of the context
(Lynch & Cicchetti, 1998). In such a process,
they proposed that early problems in functioning and ecological risk at multiple levels of
the ecology can serve to mutually contribute
to continuity in the adversity facing the child.
This view is in keeping with the stability found
in adversity as at-risk children move from one
context to another through development (Sameroff, Seifer, & Bartko, 1997). Lynch and Cicchetti (1998) demonstrated one direction of a
transaction between child and context, such
that earlier contextual factors were predictive
of later child functioning. Maltreatment, witnessing of violence in the community, and reported victimization by violence were all negatively associated with the childrens functioning
1 year later. Evidence was also found for effects in the second direction from child to
context in that childrens earlier level of behavioral functioning was predictive of later
exposure to community violence.
A large body of research exists that supports a link between early parentchild attachment relationships and later social relationships outside the family, with the childs
representations of relationships and capacity
for the regulation of emotions acting as mediators in the transactional pathway. Here, we
confine our discussion of the role of representations to the special and extreme case of the

A. J. Sameroff and M. J. MacKenzie

maltreated child. A recent examination of these

processes comparing the representations of maltreated and nonmaltreated children in a preschool setting found that the narratives of the
maltreated children contained more negative
maternal and self-representations than those of
the nonmaltreated children (Toth, Cicchetti,
Macfie, & Emde, 1997). Despite the inability
to conclusively determine if these differential
representations arose as a result of the maltreatment or if they preexisted in the child and
contributed to the maltreatment, there was evidence that the negative representations of
maltreated children did go on to impact their
interactive behavior. The maltreated children
were observed to be more controlling and less
responsive with the examiners during the administration of the instruments.
Shields et al. (2001) provided further evidence to support the finding of differential representations of caregivers by maltreated children. In this analysis, however, the authors did
pursue the next step and examined whether
representations of caregivers are carried forward to influence later child behavior and impact developing peer relationships. Maladaptive representations were predictive of rejection
by peers in a pathway mediated by emotion
dysregulation and aggression. In contrast, the
positive and coherent representations characteristic of nonmaltreated children were associated with more prosocial interactive behavior
and peer preference. Peers were found to respond to maltreated childrens dysregulated
behavior by avoiding, withdrawing from, or
actively rejecting and victimizing them. Shields
and colleagues reported being discouraged by
how quickly the maltreated children were disliked upon entering a new social group.
Infantcaregiver attachment and emerging
social competence. A central tenet of attachment theory is that an infants secure relationship with the primary caregiver sets the stage
for healthy emotional development and subsequent relationships outside of the family context (Bowlby, 1969, 1973, 1980; Bretherton,
1990). The transactional linkages in attachment
theory begin with caregiver behavior that establishes the quality of the attachment representation, which in turn affects the quality of

Transactional models

the childs later social interactions. There is

an extensive literature establishing a link between quality of childcaregiver attachment
and later social competence (Kerns, Klepac,
& Cole, 1996; Lamb & Nash, 1989), but there
have been fewer efforts to clearly elucidate
the pathway whereby aspects of the early
childcaregiver relationship are internalized
and carried forward impacting development in
broader social settings. One such effort was
the work of Sroufe (1983), who, by capitalizing on the opportunity presented by a laboratory preschool sample of children from an ongoing project of mothers and their children,
explored the importance of a secure attachment to later competence and adaptation. A
detailed study of preschool children who had
been classified as having secure, avoidant, and
resistant attachment patterns during infancy
allowed for an examination of aggression, prosocial behavior, status with peers, and dependency. The children who were securely attached
as infants had greater self-esteem, exhibited
fewer problem behaviors, and were more ego
resilient, independent, compliant, empathic,
and socially competent.
Although the Sroufe (1983) study did not
include an explicit analysis of the impact of
children with different attachment working
models on subsequent teacher responses, some
of the teacher results do point to such transactional influences. Teachers were asked to provide one-phrase descriptions of the children,
which ranged from Ideal kid, good looking,
OK. Well-coordinated, agile, competent . . .
for a secure child to Mean to other children,
kept things which didnt belong to her. The
most dishonest preschooler I have ever met
. . . for a child classified as avoidant. In fact,
whenever there was a situation in the classroom that the teacher was angered enough to
want to isolate a child, the child was an avoidant group baby, which Sroufe suggests is clear
evidence that children elicit differential reactions from teachers that is dependent on their
attachment status. In a follow-up report, resistant infants were rated by observers to be less
confident and assertive and have poorer social
skills than securely attached infants (Erickson, Sroufe, & Egeland, 1985). Avoidant children were found to be more dependent on their

629

teachers; to exhibit poorer social skills; to be

less compliant with their teachers instructions; and to exhibit more negative emotions,
including whining and pouting. These two
studies provided strong evidence that aspects
of the parentchild relationships are internalized and carried forward by the child into
other settings.
Comparing preterm and full-term development. As we discussed earlier, there is great
difficulty inherent in disentangling bidirectional influences in naturalistic observations
of ongoing parentchild relationships, but comparisons of categories that are independent of
parent behavior, such as preterm and full-term
infants, can provide some insight into transactional processes. In an example of such a research endeavor preterm and full-term infants
were observed during dyadic feeding interactions at 4 and 8 months of age and during a
teaching task with their mothers at 4, 8, and
24 months of age (Barnard et al., 1984). True
differences existed in infant behavior at 4
months of age, with preterm infants exhibiting
lower levels of responsiveness and involvement than the comparison full-term infants.
Concurrent differences in maternal behavior
were also found at 4 months, with mothers
of preterm infants showing higher levels of
stimulation compared to mothers of full-term
infants. By 8 months of age there were no
longer differences in the task involvement of
preterm and full-term infants, yet the differential maternal behavior remained. These results
extend the prematurity stereotype findings
into more natural settings, because even though
true child differences have largely diminished
by 8 months, differences remained in maternal behavior. In fact, differential maternal behavior was found to persist at least until the
24-month assessment, at which the mothers of
preterm infants exhibited fewer positive messages during teaching and reported lower levels of involvement with their children in daily
activities. These parental continuities, independent of actual preterm child behavior, are
similar to behavioral continuities in parents of
shy children discussed earlier (Rubin et al.,
1999).
In another line of study, Poehlman and

630

Fiese (2001) examined how maternal and infant vulnerabilities interacted to contribute to
attachment quality. They compared preterm
and full-term infants on measures of maternal
depression, infant health characteristics, and
attachment security at 1 year postterm. The
key finding of this study was that the relation
between maternal depressive symptoms and
attachment security was moderated by preterm birth status. For full-term infants there
was no association between maternal depression and attachment security, yet for preterm
infants such an association emerges. Poehlman and Fiese (2001) concluded that characteristics of both the mother and infant contribute in a reciprocal manner to the quality of
the dyadic relationship.
In order to effectively meet the socialization goal of teaching infants how to appropriately modulate their emotions, the caregiver
must adapt to the capacities of the child. An
unresponsive infant with some sort of anomaly would make it more difficult for a caregiver to adopt an effective socialization strategy. Malatesta, Grigoryev, Lamb, Albin, and
Culver (1986) compared the interactive behavior of mothers of normal infant with mothers of preterm infants in face to face interaction with their mothers. Preterm infants were
found to spend less of their face to face interaction involved in eye contact with their mothers and express more negative emotion, which
may account at least in part for the failure of
mothers of preterm infants to match their infants expressions of surprise and sadness. In
contrast, the full-term mothers exhibited significantly more matching of infant facial expressions. As added evidence for the effect of
differential infant expressive behavior on maternal responses, there were minimal birth-status
effects when considered independently of the
actual infant interactive behavior. Combining
the results of experimental manipulations in
prematurity labeling studies and observations
of real interactions provides corroborative evidence of differential maternal behavioral responses to differences in full-term and preterm infant behavior.
Grade retention. The previous examples of naturalistic research opportunities focused on indi-

A. J. Sameroff and M. J. MacKenzie

vidual relationship level processes. This fourth

example is focused on the institutional level
process of grade retention in the educational
setting to explore the adverse effects of social
categories and system processes. The decades
old debate between advocates of social promotion on one side and grade retention on the
other, combined with the tremendous financial costs of keeping children in school longer
as associated with retention, led Jimerson (1999)
to utilize the data from a 21-year prospective
longitudinal study in order to develop a more
complete picture of the late adolescent outcomes associated with early grade retention.
When comparisons were made among three
groups, a group of students that were retained,
a comparison group of low-achieving students
that were nevertheless promoted, and a higher
achieving control group, the retained students
had a greater likelihood of poorer educational
and employment outcomes during late adolescence. In contrast, the group of low-achieving
students that was promoted was comparable
to the control group in later employment outcomes. The author underscored the importance
of considering the effects of grade retention
using a transactional framework, highlighting
the conspiring nature of the structural level
factors that maintained a particular positive or
negative trajectory once it was established.
Jimerson concludes that grade retention leads
directly to the later poor outcomes as the result of a transactional process because of the
lack of prior achievement differences between
the retained and promoted group.
Intervention studies as a window
into transactional processes
The ultimate goal of our concern with developmental psychopathology is to improve the
lives of individuals at risk for mental health
problems. But intervening also informs more
basic understanding of developmental processes
as captured by Dearborns maxim, Bronfenbrenner, if you want to understand something,
try to change it (Bronfenbrenner, 1979, p. 37).
More generally, there is a great need to capitalize on the potential for research on prevention
and intervention strategies to inform developmental theory. Nonexperimental approaches,

Transactional models

however, can only point to associations between risks and outcomes and suggest potential pathways, whereas intervention designs
offer the ability to unravel the causal connections underlying both psychopathological and
normative outcomes (Cicchetti & Hinshaw,
2002a; Cowan & Cowan, 2002).
In nonexperimental research the problem
of the unknown third variable is an important
consideration. For example, data associating
child maltreatment with later bad interactions
with teachers and peers in the school environment does not allow us to conclude a causal
relationship because there is the possibility that
some characteristic of the child caused both
the maltreatment and later social adjustment
difficulties. Randomized intervention designs
afford researchers the opportunity not only to
determine the effectiveness of their particular
program but also to control for alternative interpretations by more fully testing causal theoretical models (Conduct Problems Prevention Research Group [CPPRG], 2002).
An example of such an approach comes from
the Fast Track prevention trial, a comprehensive program aimed at preventing the early onset of conduct problems in children. Kindergarten aged children were rated by both teachers
and parents, and those deemed to be at high
risk for early conduct problems were randomly assigned to treatment or control conditions. The treatment group receives an array
of services aimed at the areas of parenting,
school success, and social cognitions. The program involves parent training, home visitation, social and socialcognitive skills training, academic tutoring, and teacher consultation
(CPPRG, 2002). In addition to demonstrating
the effectiveness of the Fast Track program at
limiting parenting problems, referral for special education, and aggressive behavior, the
randomized nature of this prevention design
has also allowed the researchers to begin to
unravel and test the mediational pathway hypothesized by their theoretical model. They
proposed and found that the intervention on
proximal targets (e.g., harsh parental discipline style and child attributions) mediated the
effect on more distal child behavioral outcomes (CPPRG, 2002).
A practical test of the transactional model

631

is whether or not it informs preventive intervention programs. The study of the Fast Track
program highlights the valuable opportunity
that developments in prevention science offer
for breaking into reciprocal processes and
testing and elucidating transactional models
of development as they apply to both typical
and atypical populations. Sameroff and Fiese
(2000; Sameroff, 1987) proposed a transactional model of intervention that conceptually
separated the eliciting effect of the child, the
parents interpretation of the elicitation, and
the parents response. Their model was described in terms of three Rsremediation, redefinition, and reeducationdirected at the
three parts of the system. Although the three
targets are different aspects of a dynamic transactional system, most interventions will spill
over into more than one category. Changes in
the child through remediation can change the
way parents perceive their children producing
a redefinition. Redefining a child for the parents can change the way they will interact
with them as if they had been reeducated. Reeducation to change parents interactive behavior can produce consequences that will
change the parents attributions, again resulting in a redefinition. These intervention strategies are another example of the need to use
mechanistic approaches, not only to produce
a structural model for testing hypotheses, but
also to produce a practical model to direct
change agents at available nodal points in an
ongoing multivariate dynamic system.
Remediation. Interventions directed at the infant, remediation, are usually interpreted as
directly effecting outcomes through personal
changes. In a transactional system linkages to
later behavior are seen as mediated or moderated by responses of parents. In this light,
changing the child is only linked to later behavior if it changes intervening parental attributions and behavior. One example of a remediation strategy is to medicate children to change
their behavior to better fit the social expectations and competencies of parents and teachers, as in the case of active children (Barkley,
1990).
A linear interpretation of the poor psychological outcomes of malnourished children was

632

that cell growth in the brain was altered (Stein

& Susser, 1985). A transactional interpretation is that parental response mediated the effect. To examine how familial interactions
may be influenced by nutritional status, Barrett, RadkeYarrow, and Klein (1982) compared a group of children who had received
caloric supplementation with a group who did
not. The infants who received the nutritional
supplements demonstrated greater social responsiveness, more expression of affect, greater
interest in the environment, and higher activity at school age. Nutritional supplements increased the infants energy level, enabling the
nourished infants to participate more fully in
social interactions, giving clearer cues about
their condition and eliciting a wide range of
behaviors from their parents, including feeding. Similarly, placing very low birthweight
infants in a stimulation program that increased
their wakefulness and responsivity also increased the frequency of parent visits to the
nursery, providing more opportunities for socializing experiences (Rosenfield, 1980).
In another example of an intervention focused at changing the child, Zeskind and Ramey (1978) intervened with fetal malnutrition
in high-risk families. At 3 months of age, in
both the control and intervention groups, the
infants who experienced fetal malnourishment
had lower Bayley Mental Development Index
scores (MDI) than those who were not fetally
malnourished. By 18 months of age, however,
the gap in MDI scores between the groups had
disappeared for a day-care group but not for
a no-treatment control group. Zeskind and Ramey (1978) also found that these child changes,
in turn, changed the quality of the childcaregiver relationship. At 6 months of age, malnourished and nonmalnourished children in
both the control and day-care conditions experienced similar amounts of maternal involvement;
but by 18 months of age, the malnourished children in the no-treatment control condition had
mothers that were significantly less involved
than the other mothers. Intervening with the
child led to differences not only in the child,
but also in the motherchild relationship.
Redefinition. Changing parent attributions (redefinition) is a strategy that does not require

A. J. Sameroff and M. J. MacKenzie

change in the infant. This is especially important when the infant cannot easily be changed,
as in the case of biological anomalies such as
preterm birth or developmental disabilities or
individual differences such as difficult temperaments. However, even children without
obvious deviancies can be problems for parents who frame them negatively and then engage in nonresponsive or negative interactions
ranging into maltreatment. The transactional
aspect is primarily important in changing the
parents interpretative frame.
A redefinition intervention was designed to
address infant feeding problems (Benoit, Madigan, Lecce, Shea, & Goldberg, 2001). Mother
infant dyads that were having feeding problems were assigned either to a feeding-focused
intervention, which trained mothers in appropriate feeding techniques, or a play-focused
group, which received a slightly modified version of a videotaped feedback intervention,
termed Interaction Guidance (McDonough,
1993). During the feedback session, parent
infant interactions were reframed to highlight
infant responsiveness to different aspects of
parent behavior. The Interaction Guidance
group exhibited a significant decrease in atypical behaviors and disrupted communication
during interactions. In contrast, there was no
change in the feeding-focused skill training
group. This suggests that feeding problems
are not simply a feeding skills issue; instead,
they reflect a disturbance in the relationship,
which can be effectively dealt with through
redefining the mothers perceptions and beliefs.
Maltreatment is another area where linear
explanatory models are common; deviant parents engage in deviant child rearing. A transactional perspective would focus on the parents inappropriate interpretations of childrens
behavior. With this as the target, an intervention tested the capacity of a brief cognitive
component of a home visitation program to
prevent later child maltreatment by high-risk
parents (Bugental et al., 2002). Building on
previous work by their group on attributions,
Bugental and colleagues developed a program
focused on the caregivers attitudes and beliefs
about the child in an attempt to shift the way
in which parents were interpreting caregiving

Transactional models

problems before they escalated to an abusive

situation. Strong support was found for the cognitive reframing program. Mothers in the cognitive program exhibited lower levels of harsh
parenting than did mothers in other groups.
The percentage of mothers who were abusive
during the first year was only 4% in the cognitive home visitation group as compared to
26% in a no-intervention control group and
23% in a home visitation condition without a
cognitive component. The Bugental et al. (2002)
study is another example where positive engagement may be facilitated through refocusing the parent on other more acceptable attributes of the child and reframing his or her
interpretation of caregiving problems.
Reeducation. Efforts aimed at reeducation do
not rely on transactional effects, although they
may produce them. The focus is on the end of
a transactional chain where the child can be
providing normative eliciting behavior to the
parents, the parents attributions can be positive, but they do not have an adaptive repertoire of interactive behaviors in terms of either sensitivity or skills. Again, the contrast is
with a linear model in which early problems
in the child are directly related to later problems in the child as in the case of low birthweight infants.
The majority of reeducation efforts are directed toward the family or individual parent
and serve to provide information about specific caregiving skills. The Infant Health and
Development Program (IHDP; 1990) was one
such reeducation intervention aimed at enhancing the development of low birthweight premature infants. The IHDP was a multisite clinical
trial that combined family and home-based
educational interventions with child-focused
center interventions. For the purposes of this illustration, we will limit our discussion to the
home-based educational component. The families enrolled in the program received interventions over a period of 3 years, which provided
parents with information on child development,
instruction in the use of age-appropriate games,
and family support for identified problems.
Intervention effects improved cognitive development and reduced reports of child behavior
problems 2 and 3 years after the intervention

633

(BrooksGunn, Klebanow, Liaw, & Spiker,

1993). Intervention effects also improved the
quality of maternal assistance, the childs persistence and enthusiasm, and dyadic mutuality
in a laboratory setting (Spiker, Ferguson, &
BrooksGunn, 1993).
In contrast to large center-based reeducation interventions are interventions more tailored to meet the needs of individual families.
McDonoughs (1993, 2000) Interaction Guidance gives feedback to parents while viewing
videotapes of family interactions to increase
positive family interactions. The feedback portion of the session serves to identify interactive behaviors that are reinforcing to the parents as well as patterns of interaction that lead
to less enjoyable exchanges. In an interesting
effort to contrast a primarily redefinition intervention (psychodynamic therapy for the
mother) with a primarily reeducation therapy
(Interaction Guidance) both were found to
have similar effects in improving outcomes
for children referred to a psychiatric clinic
(Cramer et al., 1990). The psychotherapy approach succeeded in improving mothers perceptions but also subsequent interactions with
their infants and the Interaction Guidance approach changed interactions but also improved
mothers subsequent perceptions of their infants.
Another effort to both inform clinical
knowledge and provide insight into the direction of socialization effects, as outlined above,
was explicitly explored by LaFreniere and Capuano (1997) in order to reduce disturbances
in the childcaregiver relationships for young
children with anxiouswithdrawn behavior.
Their home visit based intervention for preschool children consisted of 20 sessions spread
out over a 6-month period, which sought to
educate the caregiver on his or her childs developmental needs and parenting issues. Starting with parent education and skills training,
in later sessions they moved to viewing videotapes of motherchild interactions and modifying problem behavior. The mothers in the
treatment group exhibited significant changes
in their exertion of appropriate control and became less intrusive with their children. Their
children ended up showing higher levels of
cooperation and enthusiasm and teachers rated

634

them as more socially competent than control

children. The transactional nature of this prevention program was illustrated by the changes
in child behavior, as assessed in the school,
resulting from an intervention aimed at improving motherchild relationship processes.
Analyses of all three Rs were combined in
an intervention to improve developmental outcomes for motorically impaired preschool children. Woolfson (1999) found this useful because he found redefinition to be as important
in outcomes as the more traditional use of child
remediation and parent reeducation strategies.
Prevention and intervention science (Coie,
MillerJohnson, & Bagwell, 2000; Coie et al.,
1993) have moved toward more and more explicit models for their efforts (Price, 1983).
From early experiments where only outcome
was assessed, current efforts are required to
specify and measure changes at every level of
the system. Analytically, this means a move
from linear mediation models to nonlinear
moderation models where many factors are interacting in producing the expected outcomes.
Beginning with assessments of whether interveners are delivering program components to
the parents, moving to assessments of whether
the parents have been changed by the intervention, and only then testing to see if the
children had different outcomes will bring to
light more and more evidence for the effectiveness of interventions conceptualized transactionally. Because it has been so difficult to
demonstrate large positive effects of interventions with children, it should be possible with
more complex studies to determine if the failures are in the delivery and fidelity of interventions, the acceptance of the intervention
by parents or teachers, or their appropriateness for one kind of child or another.
Future Directions
The transactional model was originally described to emphasize the dynamic relation between child and context across time with particular relevance to developmental outcomes
in the child (Sameroff & Chandler, 1975). Although dynamic reciprocal interchanges were
clear parts of the model, for most readers the
imparted message was a need to broaden an

A. J. Sameroff and M. J. MacKenzie

exclusive focus on continuities and discontinuities in the child as explanations of developmental outcomes to include the continuities
and discontinuities in the social context as
well. The future agenda should be devoted to
reintegrating these two aspects. The first step
is to give full recognition to all of the possible
arrows in the structural model (Sigel & Parke,
1987). There are stabilities in all parts of the
system; there are continuities in the child, in
the childs ecological settings, and in the dyadic interactions between the child and significant others in these settings. Each of these
is more or less open to change. Given these
continuities, a transactional analysis would be
to discover the conditions under which discontinuities occur or where a change in one
partner has the opportunity to reorganize the
behavior in the other. Such analyses would
provide opportunities and also set limits for
intervention efforts to improve developmental
success. There must also be a schedule of assessments frequent enough to identify the developmental periods when child and context
are more or less open to each other and consequently most likely to change.
Under real life circumstances, the best we
can do is description. Attributing causation to
any element of the system always begs the
question of the history of that element. Is difficult temperament during infancy an expression of biological tendencies or the result of
prior parenting? Is inept caregiving an expression of parent inadequacy or a reaction to
prior experience with the child? As the child
grows these influences become more and more
difficult to untanglethe direction of effects
dilemma. Sameroff and Peck (2001) were surprised to find that parental efforts at proactive
prevention of behavioral and educational problems in their adolescent children were correlated with worse outcomes. Their interpretation was that by adolescence successful parents
only engage in these efforts if their children
still had problems. For the children who are
doing well, the parents were less concerned.
Bidirectional influences are well documented
in experimental research on childadult interactions as exemplified by the work of Bugental (1987). That direction of effects make a
difference in the real world should be docu-

Transactional models

mented in the work of interventionists working with families. A standard intervention

strategy is to change some aspect of the parent
and compare the treatment and no-treatment
group for differences in child outcomes (e.g.,
BakermansKranenburg, van IJzendoorn, &
Juffer, in press). Unless there was also an assessment of the changed behavior of the targeted parent there would be no possibility of
understanding the process involved.
This is part of a more general critique of
intervention efforts with children and adolescents: the focus is too centered on the individual level of analysis (Trickett, 1997), ignoring
the proximal processes that would lead to the
more distal child outcomes (Kellam & Van
Horn, 1997).
Multilevel analyses
We have focused this article on examining the
evidence for transactions between parents and
children, but we recognize that children and
their parents are involved in many ecological
settings that are also changing and being
changed by their participants. Explaining developmental outcomes will require attention
to these multiple sources of influence as well
as the parentchild dyad. This issue is clearest
in intervention studies where the interveners
are part of the system, but it is equally true of
all studies beyond infancy where the parent
child relationship begins to pale in the face of
peer and school involvements that occupy
more of the youths time. An example of such
a multilevel investigation is a mediation study
of the effect of economic problems on adjustment in school-aged children (Conger et al.,
2002). The chain of influence began with economic pressure, which led to emotional distress
in caregivers, which in turn was associated with
disrupted parenting practices predicting more
internalizing and externalizing problems in
the children.
In a similar vein, Hetherington, Bridges,
and Insabella (1998) identified five contributing factors in a review of the effects of marital
transitions on childrens adjustment: family
composition, individual vulnerability and stress,
socioeconomic disadvantage, parental mental
health, and disrupted family process. The au-

635

thors note the fashionable attempts to separate the contributions of child, parent, family,
and social stress to child outcomes. These efforts have led to conflicting and futile controversies because different studies with different samples and different methods provide
different explanations for child adjustment.
Their solution is the use of a transactional
model because they view the risks associated
with marital transitions as linked, mediated,
and moderated in complex ways. Moreover,
they indict static, cross-sectional studies for
giving misleading pictures of how the effects
of risk and protective factors combine.
Better statistics
We can continue to proclaim that the theory
should be complex enough to understand the
phenomena being studied; but when one combines transactional, developmental, and ecological concerns, the complexity of design is
daunting for most researchers. To the extent
that statistical advances allow more methodological complexity, design complexity will
increase. Regression analyses, structural equation modeling, and hierarchical linear regression analyses have been important additions
to the researchers armamentarium. During
the early years of the transactional model,
there was always a disquieting murmur questioning the possibility of operationalizing such
a model. With the publication of Baron and
Kennys (1986) moderatormediator paper a
new street light was lit under which investigators could seek their lost keys. However,
the ability to do such analyses at the click of
an icon has also permitted the elimination of
theory to guide such analyses.
Researchers must be encouraged to specify
the developmental model being tested, but
therein lays the ultimate rub. The models will
always be static representations of dynamic
systems. To the extent one can find dynamic
systems to model developmental processes,
such as connectionist analyses, the most interesting processes remain hidden, with only the
input and output specifiable. Richters (1997)
cogently expanded on the differences between
the open systems (von Bertalanffy, 1968) that
characterize development and the closed sys-

636

tems that characterize developmental research.

Although he offers hope for improved research
paradigms that can better approximate the reality of human experience, he and we are continually confronted with the implications of
Godels (1992) proof that one cannot understand a system from the inside. Because the scientist and the object of science are within the
same system, there will never be a complete
understanding. The list of philosophical, physical, and mathematical conundrums is endless.

A. J. Sameroff and M. J. MacKenzie

As far as the transactional model is concerned, several things are clear. Children affect their environments and environments affect children. In addition, environmental settings
affect and are affected by each other. Moreover these effects change over time in response
to normative and nonnormative events. To get
evidence of the multidirectional chaining of
such influences will require longitudinal research that pays equal attention to the details
of each individual and setting.

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