Families, Risk, and Competence

The problems of studying families arise from the difficulty in studying systems where there are multiple elements interacting with each other and with the child. How should this system be described? Still other problems relate to indirect effects; namely the influence of a particular dyad's interaction on the child when the child is not a member of the dyad. While all agree that the mother-father relationship has important bearing on the child's development, exactly how to study this--especially using observational techniques--remains a problem. While progress in studying the family has been slow, there is no question that an increase in interest in the family systems, as opposed to the mother-child relationship, is taking place. This has resulted in an increase in research on families and their effects.

This volume, by leading figures in child development on families, attests to the growing sophistication of the conceptualization and measurement techniques for getting at family processes. The third in a series that aims to address topics relevant to the developmental problems and developmental disabilities of retardation, this volume is divided into two parts. Section 1 presents basic family processes and approaches for describing family dynamics. It deals with these issues from a broad perspective, including studying families at dinner, families in different cultural contexts, and the understanding of family in nonhuman primates. Section 2 looks at family processes in the service of studying families at-risk. The risk factors include poverty, malnutrition, and developmental delay and retardation. The study of family processes in these contexts provides data on family dynamics as well as how these dynamics impact on the children's developing competence. This volume will be informative for researchers, clinicians, and educators from a variety of disciplines and settings. The editors' aim is to bring a greater clarity to issues concerning the family life of children and highlight new research and possibilities for intervention.

Autorentext

Lewis, Michael; Feiring, Candice

Zusammenfassung
Psychological research into human cognition and judgment reveals a wide range of biases and shortcomings. Whether we form impressions of other people, recall episodes from memory, report our attitudes in an opinion poll, or make important decisions, we often get it wrong. The errors made are not trivial and often seem to violate common sense and basic logic. A closer look at the underlying processes, however, suggests that many of the well known fallacies do not necessarily reflect inherent shortcomings of human judgment. Rather, they partially reflect that research participants bring the tacit assumptions that govern the conduct of conversation in daily life to the research situation. According to these assumptions, communicated information comes with a guarantee of relevance and listeners are entitled to assume that the speaker tries to be informative, truthful, relevant, and clear. Moreover, listeners interpret the speakers' utterances on the assumption that they are trying to live up to these ideals. This book introduces social science researchers to the &quote;logic of conversation&quote; developed by Paul Grice, a philosopher of language, who proposed the cooperative principle and a set of maxims on which conversationalists implicitly rely. The author applies this framework to a wide range of topics, including research on person perception, decision making, and the emergence of context effects in attitude measurement and public opinion research. Experimental studies reveal that the biases generally seen in such research are, in part, a function of violations of Gricean conversational norms. The author discusses implications for the design of experiments and questionnaires and addresses the socially contextualized nature of human judgment.

Inhalt

Contents: Preface. Part I: The Nature of Family Environments. M. Lewis, C. Feiring, The Child and Its Family. S.L. Ramey, H.K. Juliusson, Family Dynamics at Dinner: A Natural Context for Revealing Basic Family Processes. C. Feiring, M. Lewis, Divergent Family Views and School Competence in Early Adolescence. L.A. Rosenblum, Effective Mothering in a Familial Context: A Nonhuman Primate Perspective. R.D. Parke, R. O'Neil, S. Isley, S. Spitzer, M. Welsh, S. Wang, M. Flyr, S. Simpkins, C. Strand, M. Morales, Family-Peer Relationships: Cognitive, Emotional, and Ecological Determinants. M.E. Lamb, B. Leyendecker, A. Schölmerich, Everyday Experiences of Infants in Euro-American and Central American Immigrant Families. R.H. Bradley, L. Whiteside-Mansell, Home Environment and Children's Development: Age and Demographic Differences. Part II: Families At-Risk. A.J. Sameroff, W.T. Bartko, A. Baldwin, C. Baldwin, R. Seifer, Family and Social Influences on the Development of Child Competence. C.T. Ramey, S.L. Ramey, R.G. Lanzi, Differentiating Developmental Risk Levels for Families in Poverty: Creating a Family Typology. S. Dawud-Noursi, M.E. Lamb, K.J. Sternberg, The Relations Among Domestic Violence, Peer Relationships, and Academic Performance. G.H. Brody, D.L. Flor, E. Neubaum, Coparenting Processes and Child Competence Among Rural African-American Families. T.D. Wachs, Family Environmental Influences and Development: Illustrations From the Study of Undernourished Children. B.K. Keogh, L.P. Bernheimer, R. Gallimore, T.S. Weisner, Child and Family Outcomes Over Time: A Longitudinal Perspective on Developmental Delays. I.E. Sigel, Socialization of Cognition: A Family Focus. N.M. Robinson, Synergies in the Families of Gifted Children.