The Development and Social-Interactional Bases of Children’s Coexistence Reasoning

• In Event: Poster Session 13
  In Poster Session: PS 13 Topic - Cognitive Processes

Abstract

Recent research has revealed that children and adults commonly use both natural (including scientific) and supernatural (including religious) concepts to explain a single event—a phenomenon known as “coexistence” (Busch, Watson-Jones, & Legare, 2017). Some work has also identified different types of coexistence reasoning, labelled “synthetic,” “target-dependent,” and “integrative” (see Table 1; e.g., Evans & Lane, 2011; Legare et al., 2012). However, age-related shifts in the development of these coexistence types and their bases in children’s social interactions are not yet clear. The current study investigated the development and social-interactional bases of coexistence reasoning through individual child interviews and parent-child conversations.

Forty-five parent-child dyads, divided between younger (7-11 years) and older (12-17 years) children, from Vermont, U.S., generated parent-child conversations and individual child reasoning in response to “difficult to explain” stories about illness and subsequent questions (Woolley et al., 2011). In both contexts, instances of coexistence reasoning were identified and coded into types (see Table 1) (Cohen’s Kappa = .876).

A mixed measures MANOVA with a within-subjects factor of context (parent-child conversations, individual child interview) and a between-subjects factor of age (older children, younger children) revealed a significant interaction between context and age on the combined dependent variables representing coexistence [F (3, 41) = 4.73, p = .006, partial n2 = .257, Wilks’ Lambda = .743]. Univariate analyses revealed significant interaction effects on the total number of coexistence instances (F (1, 43) = 7.96, p = .007, partial n2 = .156) and on integrative explanations [F (1, 43) = 6.32, p = .016, partial n2 = .128]. When children reasoned alone (but not in parent-child conversations), older children produced more instances of coexistence overall [F (1, 44) = 12.96, p = .001, partial n2 = .227] and more integrative coexistence [F (1, 44) = 6.41, p = .015, partial n2 = .127] than younger children. For younger children (but not older children), parent-child conversations had more instances of coexistence overall [t (24) = - 3.717, p = .001] and more integrative coexistence in particular [t (24) = -2.32, p = .022] than children reasoning alone (see Table 2).

These findings suggest that coexistence reasoning is a developmental achievement. Older children more frequently recruited both natural and supernatural concepts to explain the same event of illness than younger children, and more frequently “integrated” those concepts into a single explanation. By contrast, although young children generated “synthetic” reasoning (at similar rates as older children), they did not make many attempts to relate natural and supernatural causes to each other. Parent-child conversations may hold special socializing potential for these younger children, as they displayed more frequent and more sophisticated forms of coexistence than these children generated on their own. Broadly, this work contributes to constructivist perspectives by identifying the testimony of adults that is actually available to children in their social interactions and linking that testimony to their own reasoning (Harris & Corriveau, 2014). Studies of this kind can thereby continue to illuminate the social-interactional bases of children’s reasoning.

Authors

• Allison DiBianca Fasoli, Independent Scholar
  Presenting Author

• Anna E. Kim, Middlebury College
  Non-Presenting Author

• Althea Kellett, Middlebury College
  Non-Presenting Author