Читать книгу Child Psychology - Jean-Pascal Assailly - Страница 39

In practice, the logistics of conducting cross-cultural research can sometimes involve a trade-off between breadth and precision: the collection of detailed ethnographic data across a wide range of communities by a single person, or even a single team, demands a great deal of time and effort, but there is much to be gained by combining and integrating the main points from these two approaches. Beatrice and John Whiting’s work on the emergence of social behavior, often referred to as the “Six Cultures” (1977), is a particularly significant and influential example of this successful overlap. This ambitious and unprecedented project had a series of interlocking parts. Working with their field teams, the researchers first produced detailed general ethnographies of the children’s host societies – in Kenya, Okinawa, India, the Philippines, Mexico and the United States – that included descriptions of the children’s upbringing and lives at the cultural level.

Next, the teams worked with families in each of these communities, conducting structured interviews with mothers. Finally, the field teams collected a large number of standardized observations of children’s behavior, resulting in more than 2,000 five-minute observations and nearly 10,000 coded interactions of approximately 134 children between the ages of 3 and 11.

Lamenting the fact that most existing cross-cultural work simply describes differences, rather than systematically exploring them, the authors used their body of data to address some of the most important issues in child development at the time, such as the effects of gender, age, birth order and culture on social behavior.

They also documented consistent gender differences among children, such as girls being more likely to ask for help, while boys were more likely to seek attention and dominance. These early insights into the role of culture in child socialization, and in particular in the development of prosocial behaviors, laid the groundwork for new waves of work to unpack the concept of culture.

An enduring lesson from the Six Cultures study is the effectiveness of the model for studying child development, a research model that focuses on the causes of fundamental societal characteristics, such as ecology and economics, on children’s formative practices, which in turn lead to variations in adult behaviors (Konner 2010).

To conclude this chapter, psychologists have begun to pay closer attention to considerations of culture and context when assessing human behavior. These waves of change have also reached developmental psychology, within which cross-cultural work is beginning to gain importance. Through meticulous work, we have learned more than ever about behavioral diversity in the early years of life, in different contexts, as research on children in diverse societies around the world helps us to understand the development, function and evolution of human behavior.