Beyond Transplantation and Particularism: A Proposition-Level Framework for Integrating Family Systems, Ecological Systems, and Social Learning Theory in Chinese Intergenerational Co-Residence

Abstract

Research on Chinese families leans heavily on three imported frameworks: family systems theory, ecological systems theory, and social learning theory. How they get used tends to follow one of two familiar patterns. The first is uncritical transplantation, which carries Western scope conditions over as though they were universal. The second is indigenous particularism, which asserts cultural difference without saying which part of the theory has gone wrong. This article tries a third route. Taking the cooperative-parenting temporary stem family as a strain case, a time-bounded three-generation co-residential arrangement that has become common in China’s urban and peri-urban areas, it develops a diagnostic protocol for separating proposition-level mismatch from concept-level and phenomenon-level critique, then applies that protocol to each of the three theories. The resulting diagnosis is deliberately asymmetric. Family systems theory and social learning theory each carry load-bearing propositions whose scope conditions appear to fail in this setting, which argues for revision toward boundary elasticity and toward a priority ordering among multiple modeling sources. Ecological systems theory looks under-specified rather than mismatched, its difficulty being over-accommodation. The article then argues that citing all three frameworks in parallel produces redundant and largely unfalsifiable explanation, and proposes instead a four-tier architecture (scoping, structure, mechanism, specification) in which each theory answers a distinct class of question and hands a specified variable to the next tier. Indigenous Chinese scholarship enters this architecture as the mechanism specifier that supplies content to variables the imported theories leave open. Seven falsifiable propositions and their design implications close the article.