Secondary Analysis of Cultural Data to Investigate Child Development in the Context of Globalization

• In Event: 2-006 - Exploring Neighborhood and Community Effects via Secondary Data

Abstract

The process of globalization is widespread with consequences for child development. Cultural changes associated with globalization are manifested in children's experiences - how they spend their time, interact with one another, and learn about the world. To study this process, we used secondary analysis of archival data to examine children's behaviors when small-scale traditional communities incorporate elements from industrialized societies, a principal feature of globalization. The data were collected in the late 1970s in four communities that differed in the incorporation of industrial elements: Garifuna in Belize, Logoli in Kenya, Newars in Nepal, and Samoans in America Samoa. A total of 192 children are in the sample with 48 children per community in four age groups: 3-, 5-, 7-, and 9-years of age (6 boys and 6 girls at each age). Data include ethnography, systematic naturalistic observations, and structured interviews on several cognitive measures, some adapted to the local context. To measure resources of industrialized societies, each participating home was coded for the presence of writing tablets and books, electricity and home-based water supply, and ownership of radio and television sets and motor vehicles. Cognitive performance replicated age-related improvement. Based on prior research, stronger relations were predicted between the presence of industrial elements and performance on measures associated with schooling (e.g., memory) and weaker or no relations on measures tapping maturational processes (e.g., motor coordination) and concepts common across cultures (e.g., gender constancy). Results did not match the predictions - adoption of elements from industrial societies predicted better performance on all measures and added a significant amount of variance beyond years of schooling. The results were puzzling and led to study of experiential aspects of children's lives including naturalistic observations of children's play and question-asking behavior during social interaction, as well as relations between children's exposure to open-fire cooking and cognitive performance. Results suggest various ways that the presence of industrial elements may affect children's experience on a regular basis, occur before children enter school, and appear in school-age children's experiences outside of school. This approach expands Simonton's (2003) notion of secondary-level inquiry, which emphasized specific caches of information open to further analysis, by analyzing data to investigate known questions (e.g., age-related changes in memory performance) and new areas of study (e.g., children's question-asking). The results suggest that secondary analysis of historical cultural data can provide valuable insight as scientists try to make sense of developmental data in a rapidly changing world.

Authors

• Mary Gauvain, University of California, Riverside
  Presenting Author

• Robert Lee Munroe, Pitzer College