Author Description

The book is divided into four sections that dialectically move in a spiral from a description of transactional theory to how it has influenced research practice to how that practice has reciprocally led to conceptual and statistical advances of the theory. It moves from studies of the parent-child microsystem to transactions with broader social contexts of school and culture to illustrate the ubiquity of bidirectional influences throughout the social ecology, and in the end it connects transactional thinking to other dynamic systems theories, reinforcing and generalizing the systems metaphor that is at the forefront of contemporary developmental science.