The Ecology of Risk and the Geography of Intervention: From Research to Practice for the Health and Well-being of Urban Children

Abstract

A review of research and practice underlying preventive intervention to enhance children's health and welfare identifies a progressive evolution of the traditional medical model toward an expanded socioecological perspective. This expanded perspective implies that consideration should be given to a broader set of factors affecting children's health and welfare—factors that operate at spatial scales removed from children's immediately experienced worlds and that thus place them at risk indirectly. The nature of risks to child development and health are described and related to Bronfenbrenner's (1979) framework for investigating the ecological dimensions of human development. I propose a hierarchy of spatial scales for preventive intervention efforts and identify the three scales of social situation, ecological setting, and cultural context of children's lives as embracing the variety of risk factors suggested by Bronfenbrenner's framework. Recent research on the different ways in which helping networks operate in urban neighborhoods suggests a means of identifying population sub-groups for preventive intervention at the scale of children's activities and experience.

Key Words:

• social ecology
• social geography
• child development
• children's health
• preventive intervention
• risk
• medical geography
• neighborhoods