SOCIAL ENVIRONMENTAL RISK AND PROTECTION: A TYPOLOGY WITH IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS.

Assessment serves multiple purposes in school-based prevention efforts with children. Assessment data may provide a description of problems, understanding of the factors contributing to problems, guidance in the choice of appropriate prevention strategies, and/or data for evaluating change (Corcoran & Fischer, 2000; Holmbeck, Greenley, & Franks, 2004; Merrell, 2003; Richman, Bowen, & Woolley, 2004). Of these purposes, guidance in the choice of prevention strategies may currently be given the least attention by assessment developers. At the same time many practitioners have a high need for such guidance. The most commonly used assessments in schools collect data that describe in detail the nature, frequency, and duration of problems in academic performance and social behavior at the individual or school level (N. K. Bowen, 2006). Such problem-oriented assessments do little to promote understanding of why behavior and performance problems exist and, therefore, provide little guidance in prevention planning. At the same time, an extensive body of theoretical and empirical work on child development suggests that the academic performance and socio-emotional functioning of a child at any given time can be explained by characteristics of the individual, past and current characteristics of the environment, and ongoing transactions between the individual and the environment (e..g, Bronfenbrenner, 1992; Fraser, Kirby, & Smokowski, 2004; Rutter, 2001; Sroufe, 1997). Assessing aspects of the social environment experienced by the child, therefore, may provide understanding of the causes of problems and guidance in prevention planning (N. K. Bowen, 2006; Richman, Bowen, & Woolley, 2004; Silverman & Saavedra, 2004). A potential drawback of assessing multiple aspects of the social environment is the complexity of the assessment results. The translation of multi-faceted results into appropriate prevention strategies for individuals or groups may not always be straightforward. If social environmental assessments are to make a valuable contribution to school-based practice, strategies for summarizing and applying their results to prevention planning are needed. One strategy is to identify common patterns, or profiles, of social environmental experiences. One aim of the current study was to simplify complex social environmental assessment data by identifying common profiles of risk and protection. Social environmental assessment data from 532 elementary school children were submitted to a latent profile analysis (LPA) in order to identify groups of students with unique profiles of risk and protection. The typology was validated through an examination of whether students with different profiles of risk and protection performed differently on a variety of outcomes. The second aim of the study was to illustrate how a typology of social environmental risk and protection can help school-based practitioners answer the following four key questions of prevention planning: (a) Who should be targeted? (b) Which social environmental factors should be targeted? (c) How much change should be sought? and (d) Which prevention strategies should be implemented? In summary, this article asserts the importance of assessing the social environments of elementary school children in order to plan effective and appropriate prevention efforts. A typology of social environmental risk and protection is used to illustrate how complex data on the social environment can help school-based practitioners answer four key prevention planning questions. In addition, the Elementary School Success Profile (ESSP, N. K. Bowen, 2006; N. K. Bowen, Bowen, & Woolley, 2004) is presented as an assessment tool that provides school-based practitioners with social environmental data to guide prevention planning with their own students.