Kurt Kreppner

Infant and Family Development: From Triads to Tetrads

This research involves an interactional analysis of the family system as it changes with the arrival and development of a second child. In a longitudinal-observational study 16 families expecting their second child at the beginning of the study were observed over a period of 2 years in their homes. Observations consisted of a total of 26–28 videotapes (30–60 min each) per family. In addition, parental interviews dealing with biographical and child-rearing information were conducted. Data analysis involved the use of hermeneutic techniques with an emphasis on data fit and wholistic interpretation rather than early data quantification. Using such an approach, general patterns of changes in family interaction coinciding with developmental changes in the second child were delineated. The major result described here is the articulation of a three-phase process through which families progress as they change from a triadic to a tetradic system. These phases are seen to result from the interaction of structural features within the family and developmental changes in the second child.

The child and the family: interdependence in developmental pathways

This contribution focuses on the family as the major context for childrens development, it includes concepts of the family as an institution for the transmission of meaning on the one hand, and it formulates implications for new theoretical and methodological approaches in the field of family research on the other. The idea of transmission of a societys meaning system via the family is discussed under the perspective that the socialization of children in the family provides a continuous basis for the aggregation of common knowledge over generations. The systems approach is taken as a promising model for dealing with the complex continuity and change issues during development. Data will be presented from two longitudinal studies, in which parent-child communication behavior was analyzed over time during two critical developmental periods, during the first two years after the birth of a second child and during the transition from childhood to adolescence.

Sobre a maneira de produzir dados no estudo da interação social

In this article, it is argued that the most urgent and necessary requisite for observational research is the creation of material-sensitive categories which depict details of specific situational and human conditions of exchange. It is also argued that the process of selection of single items in the stream of events is regulated by theories and interests of the observers. Without a precise set of hypotheses, no categories can be formulated. However, categories should be created in intense interaction with the observed material and new categories which can describe unexpected events during observations should be allowed. Since video-recordings guarantee a conservation of the original situation, a new and intense approach for generating categories is proposed which abandons the restrictive use of predefined categories and argues for openness and an extensive process of exchange with the material before abstractions and categories are formulated.

William L. Stern, 1871–1938: A neglected founder of developmental psychology.

William Stern was born in 1871 in Berlin, Germany, and died in 1938 in Durham, North Carolina. Educated at Berlin University, he developed very early a theoretical view to overcome the fundamental split in the academic psychology of his time, that between elementarism and wholism on the one hand and environmentalism and nativism on the other. Besides inventing such well-known concepts as IQ, differential psychology, and the nomothetic-idiographic approach, Stern put much effort into developing a personalistic psychology that emphasized both the individuals active role and the importance of context in development. This article focuses on Sterns main contribution to developmental psychology

Enactivism and Monadology: Where Are Baerveldt and Verheggen Taking the Individual and Cultural Psychology?

The number of concepts which attempt to describe the exchange process between individual and environment is legion. The proposal offered by Baerveldt and Verheggen (1999) to deal with some of the problems of conceptualizing the exchange between individual and environment is reviewed and the authors’ main idea—to construct the individual as an enactive and autonomous unit, on the one hand, and culture as the formative power of an individual’s proximal environment, on the other—is discussed in a historical perspective. The venture to cut down this number to only one rather idiosyncratic view is interpreted as an unjustified procrustination of a historically rich, complex and often controversial debate which aimed at the illumination of human thought and consciousness and at the exploration of the human capacity to interact with the environment and to both internalize and create culture. Individuals’ exchange with others in order to find pragmatic solutions for common problems even in the sciences was a wellestablished tradition during humanism but began to vanish after Descartes’s reduction of the human being to a thinking unit. The paradox stated by the authors is debated within this historical perspective and their proposed solution for the problem is likened to Leibniz’s idea of conceptualizing individuals as monads interacting in a pre-stabilized harmony.

Die Bedeutung familialer Beziehungen und Kommunikationsmuster für die Persönlichkeitsentwicklung von Kindern

Die Charakterisierung von Familien als besondere soziale Einheiten hat eine lange Tradition. Durch den Lauf der Geschichte hat die Bedeutung des Begriffs „Familie“ manche Veranderung der Betrachtung erfahren. Zunachst verband man mit dem Begriff Familie eine gesellschaftliche oder okonomische Einheit, unter der man alles subsumierte, was in einem Haus oder einer Wohnung zusammenlebte (Haushalt). Lange Zeit setzte die Familienforschung ihre Schwerpunkte fur eine Differenzierung von Familien durch okonomische und makrosoziologische Merkmale. In den letzten 60 Jahren hat gegenuber dieser Schwerpunktsetzung jedoch eine markante Veranderung bei der Typisierung von Familien stattgefunden. Man kann sie als Wende hin zu einer Differenzierung nach mikrosozialen oder dynamischen Merkmalen bezeichnen. Damit wurde die Tur geoffnet fur eine Sichtweise, die Familie nicht nur als eine Hintergrundvariable fur die Vermittlung von Normen und Werten, sondern als denjenigen Kontext zu begreifen, in dem die Konstruktion der tatsachlichen Lebenswelt erfolgt und der die Entwicklung des Kindes masgeblich pragt. Wesentlich zu dieser neuen Sicht hat auch eine langsschnittliche Betrachtung der Familie in ihrem Lebenszyklus beigetragen.

Beobachtung und Längsschnitt in der Kleinkindforschung: Überlegungen zur Methodologie und Demonstration eines empirischen Beispiels

Entwicklungspsychologie und die Methoden in der Psychologie befinden sich in einem komplizierten, bisweilen sogar gespannten Verhaltnis zueinander (Sameroff, 1983; Appelbaum & McCall, 1983). Die langs- und querschnittliche Analyse von Einzelvariablen hat in der Entwicklungspsychologie bis heute zu einer unaufloslichen Vermischung von inhaltlich- entwicklungspsychologischen und formal-methodologischen Argumentationen gefuhrt (Wachs, 1984; Bornstein & Sigman, 1986; s. auch Kapitel 1.9). Das Dilemma last sich kurz so umreisen, das auf der Seite der Entwicklungspsychologie eine systematische und gerichtete Veranderung basaler Merkmale uber die Zeit postuliert wird, jedoch gleichzeitig auf einer hoheren organisatorischen und prozessualen Betrachtungsebene ein hohes Mas vonKontinuitat in den verschiedenen Bereichen der menschlichen Entwicklung angenommen wird. Konstanz und Wandel sind Schlusselkonzepte fur die Erforschung von Entwicklungsprozessen; Stabilitat und Zuverlassigkeit dagegen Grundvoraussetzungen einer psychologischen Methodik. Die Untersuchung von Veranderungen und Kontinuitaten uber die Zeit hat stets etwas von einem Paradoxon an sich. Das komplexe Netz von Kontinuitat und Diskontinuitat ist von einer Methodik, die zumeist in schlichten Vorher-Nachher-Designs einzelne Variablen zu verschiedenen Zeitpunkten untersucht, kaum elaboriert genug zu erfassen, um systematische Entwicklungseinflusse von unsystematischen Irrtumseinflussen trennen zu konnen.

Heinz Werner and the Psychological Institute in Hamburg

In this contribution, Werners time in Hamburg from 1917 to 1933 will be covered. My focus will be on Werners multif aceted, comparative approach to development, and his attempt to link organismic-vitalistic with cultural and anthropological concepts. Werner went to Hamburg from Vienna and Munich in September 1917, to become an assistant to William Stern. Although Werner had already specialized on issues of aesthetic and psychophysiological phenomena and had a genuine interest in human development when he arrived in Hamburg, he was deeply influenced by Sterns conceptual approach linking experimental and humanistic-philosophical thinking in psychology. He was the first of Sterns assistants to complete the habilitation procedure at the University of Hamburg (in December 1920), and he became a Privatdozent in 1921. He gained an independent position when he was appointed to a professorship in 1926. During the years from 1922 to 1933, Werner published numerous articles which show his broad interests, varying from basic issues, such as the law of structures, to very specific topics, such as the mutual influences of sound and color during perception. Moreover, during these years, Werner showed increasing involvement in basic concepts of developmental and comparative psychology, manifest in his famous Einfuhrung in die Entzvicklungspsychologie, which later became Comparative Psychology of Mental Development in the U.S. With regard to this approach, the influences in Werners work of von Uexkiills vitalistic biology and Cassirers humanistic and neo-Kantian approach in philosophy will be discussed. Furthermore, Werners intellectual development in Hamburg between 1917 and 1933 and his

On the generation of data in the study of social interaction

In this article, it is argued that the most urgent and necessary requisite for observational research is the creation of material-sensitive categories which depict details of specific situational and human conditions of exchange. It is also argued that the process of selection of single items in the stream of events is regulated by theories and interests of the observers. Without a precise set of hypotheses, no categories can be formulated. However, categories should be created in intense interaction with the observed material and new categories which can describe unexpected events during observations should be allowed. Since video-recordings guarantee a conservation of the original situation, a new and intense approach for generating categories is proposed which abandons the restrictive use of predefined categories and argues for openness and an extensive process of exchange with the material before abstractions and categories are formulated.

Sampling Schemes and the Selection of Log-Linear Models for Longitudinal Data

Because the selection of a sampling scheme can have strong effects on the admissibility of log-linear models, the authors discuss these effects for the multinomial and the product multinomial sampling schemes for prospective and retrospective sampling.In multi-nomial sampling, marginal frequencies are not fixed a priori.In product multinomial sampling, uni-or multidimensional marginal frequencies are considered fixed.Therefore, models must fit these marginal frequencies exactly.A data example illustrates model selection using data from a project of family development.