For over half a century, researchers have attempted to specify the effects of childrearing in socially depriving environments on child development, specifically studying the development of children from institutions found to provide few social and emotional interactions between caregivers and children and comparing findings to those for home-reared children. This paper presents a conceptual analysis of social deprivation that can be applied systematically to institutional care environments, to provide the basis for a quantitative component to the description of these environments. The paper begins with a narrative depiction of the social environments typical of socially depriving orphanages. This section is followed by a brief statement of the importance of investigating social deprivation and an acknowledgment of the complexities of studying this area. Next, a conceptualization of social deprivation and its components is presented, then a history of empirical study of the effects of social deprivation in foreign orphanages, and finally the methodology of the present paper. The conceptualization of social deprivation will then be applied to research in this area as a method for organizing and discussing social deprivation in varying social environments, and its correlates to outcomes in various domains of child development. Summaries of sociocultural theory, attachment theory, and social learning theory follow, accompanied by their predictions and explanations for some of the outcomes from research in this area. The paper ends with an introduction to the "theory of development in social environments," which integrates sociocultural theory, attachment theory, and social learning theory to create a comprehensive theory for the study of development of children in varying social environments. (Contains 38 references.) (Author/HTH)