Ruth H. Munroe

Obedience Among Children in an East African Society

Among the worlds culture areas, African societies are rated the highest in socialization for compliance. The Kikuyu, a group with typically high compliance training, were tested experimentally for obedience. Eighteen children between five and nine years of age were given two tasks by their own mothers and the same two tasks by another childs mother. Overall obedience was very high, with ten children obeying fully on all tasks. The strongest contrast with previous findings was that, unlike American children, Kikuyu children did not disobey their own mothers more than another childs mother. The strong compliance emphasis was tentatively argued to be a concomitant of the childs participation in the households economic activities.

Weber's Protestant Ethic Revisited: An African Case

Abstract McClelland (1961) has argued that the values implicit in Webers (1930) so-called Protestant ethic lead individuals to a concern with achievement. In order to investigate whether introduction of a Protestant ideology into a non-Western society was associated with an orientation toward achievement, East African Quaker Abaluyia were compared with non-Quaker Abaluyia on a battery of tests. The findings indicated that Quakers emphasized education, held realistic beliefs about the behaviors bound up with success in their sociocultural system, exhibited health patterns similar to those of educated individuals in developing countries, and had been exposed in childhood to socialization practices that downplayed physical punishment. These results, although consistent with the Weber-McClelland formulation, were relatively sparse in relation to the total number of comparisons undertaken.

Precursors of Spatial Ability: A Longitudinal Study Among the Logoli of Kenya

Abstract The present study, a follow-up of 6- to 12-year-old Kenyan children, indicated that there was reasonable continuity of performance on tests of spatial ability from early to later childhood but that a sex difference in spatial ability (found earlier among the same sample) was not displayed in later childhood. With correlational analyses, using a composite spatial score, it was ascertained that the background variables of significance for predicting spatial performance were age, years of schooling (especially for girls), directed distance from home (for boys), and proportion of time spent manipulating objects (the last two indices were derived from naturalistic observations conducted 4 years earlier). The results confirm the earlier finding (Munroe & Munroe, 1971) that movement through the environment is an important source of learning spatial skills for boys. The findings also indicate that direct tuition may be more important for the development of spatial skills in girls.

Birth Order and Intellectual Performance in East Africa

The generalizability of birth order effects found by Zajonc and Markus was investigated for a sample of 1400 high school students in rural, sub-Saharan Africa. For three intellectual test scores, performance declined as a function of birth order. Variations from monotonicity included a reversal of the performance of ranks I and 2, markedly superior performance of birth ranks 1-3 over lower ranks, and very poor scores for those at ranks 7 and lower. Family size was unrelated to test score performance. The variations were tentatively attributed to sociocultural factors that may have affected the quality of the intellectual environment for this sample.

Levels of Obedience among U.S. and East African Children on an Experimental Task

Eighteen peri-urban East African (Kikuyu) and twenty suburban middle-class U.S. children aged five to nine were tested for obedience. Within each sample, every child was directed to carry out both a prescriptive and a proscriptive task by his own mother and by another sample childs mother. No differences were found for the proscriptive task (not touching toys), and all but two children in each sample were fully obedient. However, on the prescriptive task (picking up of blocks), a significantly larger proportion of the East African children were fully obedient, and, as a group, they obeyed at a significantly faster rate than the U.S. children. The finding corroborates expectations, based on ethnographic evidence, about the strong compliance training to which sub-Saharan societies subject their children.

Effects of Population Density on Food Concerns in Three East African Societies

To investigate the validity of anthropological statements about the effects of subsistence problems on fantasy life, study was made of dense population conditions in East Africa. High density was associated with food imagery in folktales, with short-term memory for objects of food (e.g., maize) and food words (e.g., meat), with a story-theme choice emphasizing importance of food, and in dream reports, in distinction to other findings, with a low frequency of food consumption. The food concerns shown under high-density conditions in subsistencelevel societies may indicate previously unsuspected effects of strong population pressures.

Results of Comparative Field Studies

Two issues arise in specifying the boundaries of the term &dquo;comparative field studies.&dquo; First, what precisely is to be considered a field study? For present purposes, we have decided to include a broad range of comparative research, both because the number of investigations based on traditional fieldwork has been relatively small and because some behavioral disciplines, such as psychology (cf. Lonner and Berry 1986), have conceived of field research in a way that is somewhat different from the view of anthropology.’ Thus any investigation that collects primary data in a crosscultural setting might qualify for inclusion here as a field study. A partial restriction we wish to impose on this broad perspective is that cross-national research, tied as it is to comparisons among modern nations (Udy 1973), shall be reviewed only selectively. The second issue has to do with an operational definition of &dquo;comparative.&dquo; A pair of societies can be, and often has been, the basis for a comparative analysis. But Campbell’s (1961 : 344) dictum on &dquo;the uninterpretability of compansons between but two natural instances&dquo; is based upon cogent criticism of the two-case study, and

Comparative Field Studies: Methodological Issues and Future Possibilities

The review of field studies in Part One raised a number of methodological questions, some of which were taken up at the end of that article. We have reserved for this paper a discussion of more general issues of design, measurement, analysis, and interpretation. At the conclusion of the paper, with the aid of a specific research example, we shall attempt to illustrate an application of many of these methodological points.

Some psychological correlates of population density in East Africa

Among the Logoli of Kenya high population density has been found to correlate with some highly positive adaptive outcomes. This study compares such findings among the Logoli and similarly high-density population with low-density groups in order to tap psychological correlates of population density. 1084 rural students from 8 secondary schools in western Kenya representing communities of varying density levels were asked to fill in landmarks on maps that contained a road boundary and three circles representing home. Overall findings revealed that participants from high-density areas did not use more of the overall map than those from low-density areas. With respect to crowding participants from the low-density areas drew more boundaries between houses compared to participants from high-density areas but the high-density participants displayed higher variance in the number of houses they drew. However both groups did not differ on the depiction of subsistence with respect to resources concerns. In this perspective it is indicated that high-density group made more unrestricted use of the space available than the low-density participants.

Beyond cultural relativism

Ronald P. Rohner. They Love Me, They Love Me Not: A Worldwide Study of the Effects of Parental Acceptance and Rejection. New Haven, Conn.: H.R.A.F. Press, 1975. 300 pp. Figures, tables, appendices, bibliography, and index.