Whilemechanism attempts to explore questions about what makes people the way they are and organicism attempts to understand why people are the way they are, the contextualist philosophy attempts to explore what people are (Goldhaber, 2000). Contextualism taps the "historic event" as its metaphor (Pepper, 1970, p. 232), referring to how individuals experience and understand the things that happen in life (ACBS, 2007; Pepper, 1970).

Gisela Labouvie-Vief (1980) extended Jean Piaget’s cognitive-development theory into adulthood by offering a theory of pragmatic thought and cognitive-emotional complexity that sees adult development as an active process of constructing successively more adaptive levels of activity. As a neo-Piagetian theory, Goldhaber (2000) classified Labouvie-Vief's theory of programmatic thought and cognitive-emotional under an organismic lens. Because Labouvie-Vief demonstrated how contextual factors can influence cognitive development, Merriam (2007) classified the theory as contextualist. Seemingly then, Labouvie-Vief's theory belongs under a contextualist-organismic lens.

Click here for more information about Gisela Labouvie-Vief's Integrating Emotions and Cognition Throughout the LIfespan >

Falling within the Contextualist philosophical lens, lifespan developmental theory focuses on how change occurs throughout life because of reciprocal influences between the individual and the environment. In other words, individual development throughout life results from and influences the environment in which the person develops (Lerner, 2002). Understanding individual development requires a multi-disciplinary approach that considers both the individual and the context in which the individual develops.