Sara Harkness

Asian and Euro-American parents’ ethnotheories of play and learning: Effects on preschool children’s home routines and school behaviour

Asian and Euro-American parents of preschool-aged children were interviewed concerning their beliefs about the nature and purpose of play; they also completed two questionnaires and a diary of their children’s daily activities. The children’s teachers were interviewed and provided information about the behaviour of the children in preschool. The Euro-American parents were found to believe that play is an important vehicle for early development, while the Asian parents saw little developmental value in it. On the other hand, the Asian parents believed more strongly than the Euro-Americans in the importance of an early start in academic training for their children. These contrasting beliefs were instantiated in parental practices at home regarding the use of time and the provision of toys. At preschool, the Asian children were similar to the Euro-Americans on a standardised behavioural measure but they were described by their teachers as initially more academically advanced than the Euro-American children, and as showing different patterns of play and social interaction. The implications of these results for home–school relations and the design of early education programmes are discussed.

WHY AFRICAN CHILDREN ARE SO HARD TO TEST

When child psychologists explore the generality of their theories in other cultures, they frequently turn to Africa. An examination of LeVine’s bibliography’ in the Mussen handbook, for example, suggests that Africa has been the locus for nearly half of the existing cross-cultural research on children. A substantial portion of this research reports the performance of relatively nonwesternized children o n psychological tests. In addition t o issues of adapting test content t o the local culture, authors often report problems that seem t o relate t o t h e test situation i t ~ e l f . ~ ? ~ Consider, for example, our experience in testing children in Kokwet, a rural farming community of Kipsigis people in western Kenya. Several children siblings or neighborhood peers are brought to a traditional hut , where a familiar local woman adminsters several tests in a friendly and relaxed context. Children waiting t o be tested play nearby, and because the house is used by our project staff, there is often someone making tea or doing other familiar chores. As part of the test battery the child is told a story of ten sentences about a boy who was given a special stick t o help him herd the family’s cows. He is then asked t o tell the story back t o the experimenter. The chances that the child will repeat any portion of the story, no matter how short or garbled, are not great: only 10% of the three-year-olds say anything in this situation, and the proportion of children answering does not reach 50% until six or seven years. Even by age ten, a full third of t h e children d o not give a scorable reply. These children are generally healthy and well nourished. In everyday circumstances they can be as active and vocal as children anywhere, swinging from the rafters of a maize storehouse, boisterously roughhousing, o r gleefully teasing a goat. What needs t o be explained, then, is why the children of Kokwet and apparently much of the rest of Africa are so hard t o test. Why does the testing situation, even the most friendly and familiarized version of it, produce such inhibition of thoughful response? Researchers commenting o n this problem have suggested that the testing situation conflicts with behavior required of children in traditional settings. “Only when the authority figure withdraws,” writes Greenfield of her work in rural Senegal, “does the child turn fully to the logically essential parts of the a ~ t i o n . ” ~ Cole and Gay, similarly, look t o traditional life for an explanation of problems in eliciting responses f rom their Liberian subjects. “If [ the Kpelle child] asks ‘Why’ or acts in a manner unsanctioned by tradition,” they write, “he is likely t o be beaten.”2 To our knowledge, however, there has not yet been any investigation of the ontogeny of test-related behavior in African children. Thus our purpose here is to present some observations on early childhood social-

The cultural context of gender segregation in children's peer groups.

Recent American research has explored developmental trends in gender segregation of childrens peer groups. It is important to differentiate, however, systematic trends in children from systematic changes in their environments. Observational data are presented from 152 rural Kenyan children ages 18 months to 9 years. There is no gender segregation in peer groups until around age 6, at which time changes in settings, parental expectations, and customary duties result in an increase in the proportion of same-sex peers. Even within this pattern, however, there is some evidence that children do not interact more with same-sex peers, given their greater presence. A contrast is drawn with the adult pattern of gender segregation and emphasis is given to the importance of culture and development as interactive systems.

Mixed Methods in International Collaborative Research: The Experiences of the International Study of Parents, Children, and Schools:

The power of a mixed-methods approach combining anthropological and psychological theories and methods is demonstrated through the experiences of the International Study of Parents, Children, and Schools, a collaborative project involving teams of researchers from seven Western countries. The developmental niche framework of Super and Harkness proved useful for integrating multiple methods to understand the context of children’s early development at home and at school. Several parts of the study are presented as illustrations: the development and application of a common list of descriptors for coding parents’ discourse about their children; the construction of a derived etic form of a child temperament questionnaire; the discovery and exploration of ideas and practices related to parent-child co-sleeping; and the identification of cultural themes across various kinds of data. The authors conclude that a combination of anthropological and psychological methods can enrich understanding of children’s development in various cultural settings.

Culture and Psychopathology

Anthropological research and, more recently, cross-cultural studies in general have played a delicate combination of roles as they converse with psychological theory. On the one hand, they provide a method of answering questions about human behavior and development, which are central to contemporary thought; on the other, they often return only partial answers and, in addition, a new set of questions. The interplay of psychological theory contributing to the agenda for anthropological research, and cross-cultural findings challenging accepted theories of the person, has shifted from time to time, responding in part to the needs and opportunities of the larger disciplines. Throughout the interdisciplinary dialogue are woven the complementary themes of human universals and cultural particulars, or, in modem developmental terms, how and to what degree general universals become the particular specifics. This is no less true for research on psychopathology than for studies of normal development.

Parental Ethnotheories in the Context of Immigration: Asian Indian Immigrant and Euro-American Mothers and Daughters in an American Town

Cross-cultural research is inherently limited by the difficulty of disentangling cultural effects on children’s development from other environmental features that covary with culture. The growing presence of immigrant populations in the United States offers an opportunity to study parents’ cultural belief systems, or “parental ethnotheories,” as they influence children’s settings and activities in the absence of other environmental supports. This study examined Asian Indian immigrant mothers’ (n = 10) and matched Euro-American mothers’ (n = 10) ethnotheories about their daughters by means of analysis of the mothers’ discourse in the context of semistructured interviews, multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis of the descriptors, and consensus analysis. The mothers’ ethnotheories are reflected in differences between the settings and daily activities of their daughters. The Indian immigrant mothers’ ideas and practices are compared to findings in the Whitings’ comparative field studies and discussed in relation to several concepts of culture.

Culture, Temperament, and the “Difficult Child”: A Study in Seven Western Cultures

Charles M. Super1, Giovanna Axia2, Sara Harkness1, Barbara Welles-Nyström3, Piotr Olaf Zylicz4, Parminder Parmar5, Sabrina Bonichini2, Moisés Rios Bermúdez6, Ughetta Moscardino2, Violet Kolar7, Jesús Palacios6, Andrzej Eliasz4, and Harry McGurk7 1University of Connecticut, USA 2University of Padua, Italy 3Karolinska Institute, Sweden 4Warsaw School of Social Psychology, Poland 5The Pennsylvania State University, USA 6University of Seville, Spain 7Australian Institute of Family Studies, Australia

Contributions of Cross-Cultural Psychology to Research and Interventions in Education and Health

Cross-cultural psychology has made important contributions to research and interventions in education and health. In education, cross-cultural research includes the application of Piagetian tests cross-culturally and the discovery of cultural variability in styles of learning. Research using the constructs of individualism and collectivism has shown that a variety of cultural values and parenting styles can be related to school success, and awareness of such differences has been used to enhance the effectiveness of educational intervention. In health, cross-cultural psychology has contributed to the identification of culture-specific patterns of illness and beliefs about illness. Research has shown complicated relationships between cultural expectations of behavior and cross-cultural variability in children’s observed behavior. The role of cultural beliefs and related practices is highlighted in research on temperament. Theoretical models derived from cross-cultural research are shown to be useful in creating a framework for systematic consideration of education and health in cultural context.

Child-Environment Interactions in the Socialization of Affect

Research on the universality of facial expressions (Ekman, 1972) suggests that the socialization of affect involves interactions between situational variables and a finite repertoire of human emotions whose meanings are at least roughly synonymous among all members of the species. At the same time, Izard’s formulation (1978) of “affective-cognitive structures” shows that emotions are in reality not separable from the particular circumstances that are associated with them. The fact that it is possible to construct a list of “basic,” universally recognizable emotions derives not only from a species-specific repertoire of facial expressions, but perhaps more fundamentally from a larger set of human expressive behaviors, including laughter and crying as well as bodily movements and postures. These behaviors, for which a universal capacity exists, are also, without exception, carried out in particular circumstances. As elements in the human communicative function, they create the necessity of response from the environment while also being shaped by it. To use Lewis’s terms the contextual reality of emotional expression transforms “state” into “experience.”

Globalization and its discontents: Challenges to developmental theory and practice in Africa

The three contributions to this Special Section on Culture and Human Development are summarized and critiqued. In considering the nature of contemporary psychological science, as well as applications to early childhood care and development, education to prevent HIV/AIDS, and formal academic education, the various authors are in general agreement on the limitations of current knowledge as it applies to African populations. There is also a common focus on the promise of scientific procedures that take seriously the importance of local understandings, institutions, and social settings.