Think of some you know who considered dropping out of school. Bronfenbrenner suggests that focusing solely on factors such as the socioeconomic status of the family, intellectual ability, or ethnicity to explain the student's disengagement from school ignores most of the information relevant to this student's situation. Researchers must look at the relationships among variables in different environments. If you were to read an article in a research journal that sought to explain your friend's "dropping out" primarily in terms of distinct categories to which she or he belonged, you would probably be dissatisfied with the explanation, knowing that the researcher.