1. Cross Cultural Comparison of Maternal Profiles of Reaction to Conflict With Their Pre-School Children

• In Event: Novel Approaches to Characterize Observed Maternal Behavior in Various Cultural Contexts

Abstract

Background: How parents socialize their children and how they passed their goals and strategies are shaped by their cultural context (Keller et al., 2006). Because culturally-shaped maternal attitudes influence parenting behavior, we need a better understanding of how mothers from different cultural groups react in conflicting situations. The present study investigated cross-cultural variations in maternal behavior by profiling mothers from Germany, Turkey, and Turkish immigrants in Germany.
Method: A total of 96 (nGermany=38, 39.6%, nTurkish-German=33, 34.4%, nTurkey=25, 26% mother-child dyads were tested (child age range = 3-4 years) in a three-step paradigm. First, a simple card sorting game (color-sorting) was taught to children by an experimenter. Second, to learn the rules of the game, children played the card game with a puppet who violated the game rules in three out of six trials. Third, children played with their mothers who learned a competing rule compared to their child (shape-sorting). Three out of six trials were set up to be conflicting in mother-child play. Two independent observers coded for the protests of mothers from play recording according to the coding scheme based on previous studies (Rakoczy, 2008). Seven continuous parenting indicators (i.e., simple, normative, imperative, deliberative, descriptive, opinion, external) were drawn from naturalistic observation of mothers’ strategies towards children's rule violations during the three incongruent trials (Interrater Reliability, Cohen's κ=.920, 95% CI [.391 to 1.449], p <.001) and were used to inform latent profile membership.
Results: Results revealed three different profiles of maternal norm enforcement strategies. First profile (n=40, 41.7%) described mothers who adopted a more deliberative style. Second profile described mothers who had no dominant strategy, mixed various strategies, and usually preferred not to mention any opinion about the game (n=45, 46.9%). The last profile described mothers who used more assertive strategies (n=11, 11.5%). Culture significantly discriminated between three profiles. While deliberate mothers were mainly German mothers, most of the assertive mothers were Turkish immigrant mothers in Germany. And mothers from Turkey dominantly using mixed strategies.
Conclusion: These findings show distinct maternal norm enforcement profiles across cultural groups and highlight an important difference regarding parental reactions across cultures. These contexts related behavioral profiles and why they might differ across cultural groups will be discussed in this presentation. Overall, these results show the importance of recruiting inclusive research strategies and next steps include investigating the associations between norm enforcement in mothers and child development outcomes in different cultural contexts.

Authors

• Ayse Busra İplikci, Akdeniz University
  Presenting Author

• Julian Busch, Ruhr-Universität Bochum

• Moritz Köster, Freie Universität Berlin