Catherine Ann Cameron

Taiwan and Mainland Chinese and Canadian children's categorization and evaluation of lie- and truth-telling: A modesty effect

This study examined Taiwan and Mainland Chinese and Canadian childrens concepts of, and moral judgments about, lying. Participants aged 7, 9 and 11 years in those locations were read stories involving child characters doing something good or bad, and telling a lie or the truth about their own deed. They were asked whether a story characters verbal statement was a lie or the truth, and whether the statement was good or bad. Results show that most children of both cultures labelled a lie as a lie, and the truth as the truth. The major cultural difference lay in childrens moral evaluations of truth- and lie-telling in the good deed conditions: for both Taiwan and Mainland Chinese children, as age increased, lying about ones own good deeds became increasingly positive, whereas truth-telling about good deeds became less positive; for Canadian children, regardless of age, lying about good deeds was negative, and truth-telling about a good deed was positive. This effect was because of Taiwan and Mainland Chinese childrens increasing awareness of the need to be modest and self-effacing in prosocial deed situations. We replicated the modesty effect of Lee, Cameron, Xu, Fu, and Board (1997) that only involved Mainland Chinese children. Given the major differences in political, economical and educational systems between Taiwan and Mainland China, the modesty effect is likely owing to childrens socialization of Chinese traditional values in home and at school.

‘A day in the life’: advancing a methodology for the cultural study of development and learning in early childhood

This paper explores the methodology of an ecological investigation of aspects of culture in the interactional construction of early childhood in diverse global communities: Peru, Italy, Canada, Thailand, and the United Kingdom. Regarding culture as a dynamic dimension of the child’s socialisation, the approach taken was to film a ‘day in the life’ of a two‐and‐a‐half‐year‐old girl in each location. The principal investigators viewed these five ‘days’ and selected clips were made into a compilation tape, to be interrogated and interpreted by the local investigators and the child’s family. These latter reflections were also taped and then applied to a growing appreciation of the child in cultural context. Other inter‐researcher techniques were used to elucidate and explore events and values further. Reflexive concerns as to the interplay between aims and methods in interpretive research are critical components of this endeavour to develop new cultural understandings of the girls in context.

Chinese and Canadian Adults’ Categorization and Evaluation of Lie- and Truth-Telling about Prosocial and Antisocial Behaviors

This study examined cross-cultural differences in Chinese and Canadian adults’ concepts and moral evaluations of lying and truth-telling about prosocial and antisocial behaviors. Although Canadian adults categorized lies concealing one’s prosocial deeds as lies, their Chinese counterparts did not. Also, Chinese adults rated deception in such situations positively while rating truth-telling in the same situations negatively. These cross-cultural differences appear to reflect differential emphases on the virtue of modesty in the two cultures.

A “Day in the Lives” of Four Resilient Youths Cultural Roots of Resilience

Grounded in the examples of four impoverished, relocated youths (two Sesotho-speaking orphans in South Africa and two Mexican immigrants in Canada), we explore cultural factors as potential roots of resilience. We triangulate rich qualitative findings (visual, dialogical, and observational) to foreground the particular, as well as acknowledge the universal, in explicating resilience in transitional contexts. Resilience-promoting cultural practices rely on adults to function as custodians of protective practices and values and on youth actively to accept their roles as cultural cocustodians. Our findings urge service providers toward forefronting the specific cultural context of young people in their therapeutic interventions and toward purposefully championing resilience-promoting cultural values and practices.

Text cohesion in children's narrative writing

This study employed multiple regression analysis to examine the relationship between global writing quality (holistic scores) and lower level analytic measures of writing, with a focus on cohesive indices. The subjects were 9-year-old English-speaking children who participated in either a story free-writing conditio n or a story rewriting condition. The results showed that both cohesive indices and lowe r leve l writing measures (type-token ratios , mean lengt h o f utterances in morphemes, composition length, etc.) each accounted for a significant amoun t of the variance in holistic scores. The story rewriting procedure proved to facilitate the childrens writing processes and, hence, resulted in higher quality writing (in terms of both global writing quality and text cohesion) than the story free-writing condition.

Studying Resilience Across Cultures

Abstract This paper details the challenges researchers with the International Resilience Project encountered investigating resilience across cultures and contexts. The paper recounts the experiences of the global team who came together to develop a culturally embedded methodology to study resilience in fourteen communities on five continents. The team sought to better understand the phenomenon of resilience and in that process to examine critically the ‘nuts and bolts’ of how to conduct cross-cultural social research. Specifically, the incongruity between Western research paradigms and indigenous forms of knowledge generation created three unique challenges: adapting research methods to different cultures, ensuring construct validity across sites, and resolving epistemological and methodological tensions.

Bridging the Gap Between Home and School With Voice-Mail Technology

ABSTRACT Home–school relations are a growing concern for both teachers and parents. Time constraints sometimes prevent the timely, helpful contacts that enhance the mutual home and school awareness of childrens academic and personal progress, and as children grow older, the connection between school and home becomes more difficult, although equally important to maintain. Two studies were conducted that explored the satisfaction of both parents and teachers with their accessibility to each other. Further, an intervention was monitored in which a voice–mail telephone system was used as an alternative vehicle for communication between parents and teachers. Findings showed an enhancement at the upper elementary level in both quality and quantity of teacher–parent communication.

Frog, where are you? Children's narrative expression over the telephone

Many researchers believe that the use of distanced language is at the core of the transition to literacy and that reading and writing are consummate acts of this distancing, or decontextualization. Talking on the telephone offers an ecologically valid intermediate context to ascertain developmental components of such metacommunicative awareness as the need to be clear to communicative partners to compensate for their physical distance. Childrens telephone communications demonstrate how they recon‐textualize language to be better understood. Sixty 4‐, 6‐, and 8‐year‐olds told stories from the wordless picture book, Frog, Where Are You? (Mayer, 1969), to a present communicative partner and to that same individual over the telephone. Children from age 4 onward created different narratives over the telephone from face‐to‐face in length, narrativity, revision, and goal‐related events. Research on the effects of telephone experience could enhance understanding of the effects of such metalinguistic phenomena on...

“Let Me Show You a Trick!”: A Toddler's Use of Humor To Explore, Interpret, and Negotiate Her Familial Environment During a Day in the Life

Abstract Children employ different types of humor as they explore, interpret, and negotiate their environments. Whereas an appreciation of verbal incongruity has been a hallmark of older preschooler humor (e.g., McGhee, 1989), more recently, other violations of expectations and clowning also have been identified as ubiquitous during the first two years of life (e.g., Loizou, 2005; Reddy, 2001). We examined the pragmatics of one 30-month-old girls humor, and determined how it interactively harnessed the cognitive, linguistic, and socio-emotional resources available to her negotiations within her familial context. Using the methodology of a Day in the Life of a toddler in early childhood (Gillen et al., 2006), the childs entire waking day was videotaped, and all interactions were transcribed and analyzed. We identified many instances of humor, and categorized them into four major types: clowning, teasing, jokes and playful language, and physical actions. Humor served both socio-emotional and cognitive-linguistic functions, and we confirmed Reddys (2001) finding that early humor is interpersonally co-constructed: When humor operates within the childs inter-mental development zone (Mercer, 2000), it serves to inform her or his intra-mental growth; the inter-mental precedes and enables the intra-mental.

Children's revision of textual flaws

Two studies are reported here that investigated elementary school children’s text revision. In the first experiment, both semantic and surface flaws were inserted in texts that varied in reading difficulty. Second-grade through fifth-grade students revised these experimenter-generated passages, presented as examples of submissions to a class newspaper. Differences in text reading difficulty did not affect revision effectiveness, nor were the semantic flaws especially difficult to detect and revise. An age effect showed growth in the revision of both semantic and surface errors from grades 2 to 4 with 2nd-graders revising one-third of the inserted errors, and 4th- and 5th-graders revising three-quarters of them. Revision and cloze reading comprehension skills were correlated. A second study compared students’ revision of their own as well as another’s text flaws. Fifth-graders wrote a narrative for a classroom anthology, and they revised both their own and inserted flaws. Their writing was evaluated holistically. Rates of both semantic and surface revision were somewhat lower for their own as opposed to another’s text errors, but revision rates were nevertheless relatively high, and they correlated with writing quality; that is, children who wrote high-quality texts also revised more errors, especially experimenter-inserted flaws. These data confirm that children respond positively to writing challenges in the area of revision, a skill in process of development, which is amenable to inspection and appears ripe for facilitation.