Tuesday, August 4, 10:00 a.m.- 12:30 p.m.
Arntzen Hall 100
This symposium features invited presentations by researchers who were friends and colleagues of the late Ruth Hagberg Munroe. They will honor her long and distinguished career as a developmental psychologist. Participants present their own research and each addresses different questions and issues concerning cultural influences on human development.
Convenor: Deborah L. Best, USA
Children's play and the emergence of a gendered division of labor: A
reanalysis of the social behavior data collected by Beatrice and John Whiting,
Ruth and Robert Munroe, and other collaborators
Carolyn Pope Edwards, USA
Cross-cultural studies in child development in Asian contexts
Daphne M. Keats, AUSTRALIA
History, culture, learning, and development
Patricia Greenfield, Ashley Maynard, Carla Childs, USA
The cultural construction of Yucatec Mayan children's activities
Suzanne Gaskins, USA
Household size and infant indulgence in an Indian town
Susan Seymour, USA
Gender concepts: Convergence in cross-cultural research and methodologies
Deborah L. Best, USA
Ruth Hagberg Munroe
The late Ruth Hagberg Munroe, Research Professor of Psychology at Pitzer
College, was born in Poland, Ohio in 1930 and died in Claremont, California
on October 22, 1996. She received an A.B. from Antioch College, and an Ed.M.
in measurement and statistics and an Ed.D. in human development from Harvard
University, where she was trained by Beatrice and John Whiting. During the
years 1962 to 1979, with her husband, Robert L. Munroe, she carried out
major fieldwork projects in Central America, East Africa, American Samoa,
and Nepal. She published steadily and widely on numerous subjects, but her
primary interests lay in the study of children's behavior‹in its causes,
correlates, and consequences‹and in designing systematic observational
methods that could help improve our understanding of children. In 1971 she
introduced to the literature the spot-observation technique, which has since
been adopted by many researchers. Central use of that technique was made
in her last major publication, a monograph on time use among the Newars
of the Kathmandu Valley (Ruth Munroe et al., Newar time allocation.
New Haven, CT: HRAF Press, 1997). An exacting and devoted teacher at Pitzer
College, where she spent her career, Ruth Munroe earned lasting gratitude
and loyalty from her students. One of them perceptively said, "She
seems to have the ability to . . . laugh at life, . . . to step out of it
and . . . put things in their places." To her friends and colleagues,
these words may aptly describe the wry perspective they too had come to
know.
Abstracts & Authors
Children's play and the emergence of a gendered division of labor: A reanalysis
of the social behavior data collected by Beatrice and John Whiting, Ruth
and Robert Munroe, and other collaborators.
Carolyn Pope Edwards studies early childhood development and education
in comparative cultural perspective. Within cross-cultural psychology, she
is known for her work with Beatrice Whiting, the Munroes, and others on
the project that culminated in the book, Children of Different Worlds:
The Formation of Social Behavior (1988). She is currently studying Italian
family-centered public education and care programs, and is Professor of
Psychology and Family and Consumer Studies at the University of Nebraska,
Lincoln.
A recent international conference on the "Culture of Toys," led
by Brian Sutton-Smith, and co-sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution and
Emory University, made it possible to revisit data from the classic "Six
Cultures" and "Children of Different Worlds" studies. Directed
by John and Beatrice Whiting, these two projects had integrated the systematically
collected running-record and spot observations of the social behavior of
children aged 2-10 years, studied between 1954 and 1975 by the Whitings
and their collaborators (including Robert and Ruth Munroe, who directed
the collection and analysis of spot observation data) in Africa, Asia, and
North and South America.
The new analysis produced descriptive frequency data on the percentage of
protocols by boys versus girls in different kinds of games (chance, physical
skill, strategy, and rules) as well as different kinds of play (competitive,
creative, fantasy, and role play) in the Six Cultures communities. The paper
discusses the implications of these findings for the gendered division of
labor in the communities and illustrates using selected observations. One
surprising finding is the few examples of elaborate toys (either homemade
or manufactured) in most of the communities, and this finding is discussed
in terms of parents' and children's subsistence workloads as well as the
material culture (especially cast off waste products of the industrial world)
available to children for creative and fantasy play in the 1950s and 1960s.
Cross-cultural studies in child development in Asian contexts
Daphne Keats is Conjoint Associate Professor in the Department
of Psychology, University of Newcastle, Australia. She has worked in cross-cultural
psychology for many years, in Malaysia, China, Thailand and Australia. She
worked closely with Ruth Munroe while on the Executive of IACCP, and with
Ruth was made an Honorary Fellow of IACCP in 1996.
Over a number of years I have been involved in cross-cultural research with
Asian and Australian children and adolescents. In this symposium I wish
to review some of the work done with and by colleagues in Malaysia, Thailand,
Indonesia, and China. These countries are all multicultural, yet the contribution
of these Asian researchers to the study of the role of cultural factors
in development is not as well known as it should be. Some reasons for this
situation are discussed. In each of these countries far-reaching changes
now challenge traditional cultural values in family relations and child-rearing
practices. I shall try to highlight some of the most significant differences
in Asian and Western approaches to child-rearing practices and discuss these
in the context of some dominant religious, social philosophical, and ideological
positions.
History, culture, learning, and development
Patricia M.Greenfield has been involved in research on culture and
human development for the last 35 years. Her research has focused on processes
of cognitive development and cultural apprenticeship in settings from Senegal
to Rome to Los Angeles to Chiapas, Mexico. She is currently Professor of
Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Our investigation follows a group of families over two generations - studying
their learning and representational processes before and after processes
of important ecological change. The research used weaving as a focal activity
through which to explore the relationship of ecological change to socialization
and development. The study site was a Zinacantec Maya community that has
been undergoing an ecological transition from agriculture to commerce; the
time span of the study covers 24 years. Through the use of naturalistic
video, ethnography, artifacts, and experimental data, we examine the relationship
between intergenerational continuity and intergenerational change on the
cultural level and processes of learning, innovation, and cognitive development
on the individual level.
The cultural construction of Yucatec Mayan children's activities
Suzanne Gaskins has done research with the Yucatec Mayan Indians
for 20 years, focusing primarily on children and their families. She is
an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Northeastern Illinois University.
She was a student of Ruth Munroe's while attending Pomona College in the
early 1970s.
To give a culturally meaningful and accurate description of children's activities,
one needs to incorporate the Vygotskian insight that children's activities
are organized through the interpersonal construction of contexts and behavioral
options that are both consistent over time and culturally motivated. This
presentation will describe the daily lives of children living in a Yucatec
Mayan village, emphasizing how cultural beliefs and practices contribute
to the construction of the children's activities. Three forces--adult priorities,
socialization values, and children's individual motivation‹are identified
as complimentary forces that influence the organization of activity for
young Mayan children. This harmony provides the distinctive backdrop for
the daily activities of Mayan children. The advantages of this approach
will be illustrated by interpreting Mayan children's play from within this
perspective.
Household size and infant indulgence in an Indian town
Susan Seymour is Professor of Anthropology and Vice President for
Academic Affairs and Dean of Faculty at Pitzer College. Her research focuses
upon changing family organization, socialization practices, and gender roles
in India and other parts of Asia. Ruth Munroe was one of her mentors and
a close friend and colleague at Pitzer for 23 years.
One of the numerous topics that Ruth and Lee Munroe have examined in their
cross-cultural socialization research is the relationship of household size
to infant indulgence. The hypothesis that infants will receive greater indulgence
in societies where large, extended households predominate rather than small,
nuclear ones or mother-child households was raised many decades ago by Murdock
and Whiting (1951) and again by Whiting (1961), the underlying assumption
being that high indulgence occurs where there are "many hands to care
for the infant." The Munroes have tested this hypothesis in East Africa,
Samoa, and Nepal with mixed results. This paper will further explore the
relationship between household size and infant indulgence, using data from
my longitudinal study of families and children in India, in order more carefully
to refine the variables "household size" and "structure"
and the effect "infant indulgence." When doing so, some interesting
and statistically significant results emerge.
Gender concepts: Convergence in cross-cultural research and methodologies
Deborah L.Best, a developmental psychologist, studies the interface
of cognitive and social processes. Her cross-cultural research focuses upon
gender-related concepts and behaviors. She is Professor and Chair of the
Department of Psychology at Wake Forest University. As Treasurer of IACCP
for 8 years, she worked closely with Ruth Munroe who served as Secretary-General
during the same period.
Gender concepts (e.g., gender roles, stereotypes) are salient aspects of
sociocultural experience. Gender concepts have been examined by trained
researchers who collect data in their respective cultures as part of a larger
cross-cultural comparative project. Such studies use easily-administered
procedures with large numbers of participants acting as "cultural reporters."
Using this methodology, Williams and Best studied gender stereotypes in
30 countries and masculinity/femininity and gender role ideology in 14 countries.
Gender concepts have also been studied by participant-observer researchers
in specific cultures of interest. Face-to-face interviews and observations
with small numbers of participants characterize these studies. Ruth and
Robert Munroe's studies of gender concepts with children and adults in Belize,
Kenya, Nepal, and Samoa reflect this orientation. This paper will highlight
the convergence of findings and methodologies of these different studies.
Additional research exploring socialization experiences and cultural expectations
that may be linked to gender differences and concepts will be discussed.