The Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Childhood Social Development

Peter K. Smith, Craig H. Hart, Peter K. Smith, Craig H. Hart

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781444390919
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Childhood Social Development, Second Edition presents an authoritative and up-to-date overview of research and theory concerning a child's social development from pre-school age to the onset of adolescence.

• Presents the most up-to-date research and theories on childhood social development
• Features chapters by an international cast of leaders in their fields
• Includes comprehensive coverage of a range of disciplinary perspectives
• Offers all new chapters on children and the environment, cultural influences, history of childhood, interventions, and neuro-psychological perspectives
• Represents an essential resource for students and researchers of childhood social development

Part I: Historical Overview

This part of the handbook has only one chapter, but it is a chapter that sets the scene for the rest of the book. W. Andrew Collins is in an excellent position to do this. He has worked for many years at the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota, which was one of the pioneering sites of study of young children in North America. Much valuable work was done from the 1920s onward, including Mildred Parten’s famous work on social participation in preschool children (Parten, 1932), which was based on her doctoral thesis at the institute.

Collins outlines what are now seen as three main eras in the study of childhood development. The emergent era (around 1890–1919) marks the beginning of systematic interest in children’s social development, including baby diaries and some empirical studies. The middle period (around 1920–1946) saw a great increase in research, including the founding of child study centers and institutes (as at Minnesota, discussed above); normative descriptions of child behaviors; the development of observational, experimental, and questionnaire methodologies; and theoretical influences from behaviorism, psychoanalysis, and symbolic interactionism. The modern era (from around 1947 to the present) has seen the more structuralist approaches of Jean Piaget and Kohlberg, and a general consensus around the scientific nature of child development, moving beyond descriptive studies to testing various theoretical approaches in different domains.

The “modern era” is now over 60 years in duration, and it is likely that future historians of the period will, looking back, subdivide it into further periods. Many of the changes in approaches and methodologies are summarized by Collins in this chapter. Researchers in recent decades have developed more sophisticated quantitative approaches (such as multilevel analyses and structural equation modeling). In other areas, there has been increased interest in qualitative methodologies, and more participation or involvement of young people in research. And in recent years, it is clear that advances in behavior genetics (see Chapter 2) and neuropsychology (Chapter 3) are impacting our understanding of social development. These will take forward our discipline in new and potentially exciting ways; and it is easy to ignore the past and how we got to where we are. But the past may still exert a strong influence on the parameters of our present thinking, and we may learn something too from the successes and failures of our predecessors.

Reference

Parten, M. B. (1932). Social participation among preschool children. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 27, 243–269.

CHAPTER ONE

Historical Perspectives on Contemporary Research in Social Development

W. Andrew Collins

Research in social development began more than a century ago. Its roots are much older, springing from enduring philosophical traditions, as well as from theory and research in other sciences such as biology and pedagogical studies (e.g., Dewey, 1899; Hall, 1904). Only in the most general way, however, can these distal influences be discerned in the directions and concerns of social development research today. Much more visible are the intellectual currents within the social sciences themselves and themes arising from pressing social problems. The goal of this chapter is to detect those currents in this vital and increasingly diverse research enterprise.

The traditional purview of research in social development is “changes over time in the child’s understanding of, attitudes toward, and actions with others” (Hartup & Laursen, 1991, p. 253). Although interest in these phenomena was apparent from the earliest research on psychological development, no history of social development as a coherent field of inquiry has previously appeared. Rather, existing historical accounts have addressed particular research topics (e.g., Eisenberg, 2002; Hartup & Laursen, 1999; Maccoby, 1992a, 1992b; Modell & Elder, 2002), the contributions of influential researchers (e.g., Arnett & Cravens, 2006; Cahan, 2003; Cairns, 1992; Emde, 1992; Grusec, 1992; Horowitz, 1992; White, 1992), and institutions and organizations that have shaped social development research (e.g., Hartup, Johnson, & Weinberg, 2002; Sears, 1975; Senn, 1975). This chapter aims to distill from these disparate efforts a historical perspective on contemporary research in the field. The chapter is divided into three sections: (a) a brief overview of historical trends, identifying significant shifts and transitions; (b) a description of major historical transformations in the field during the past century; and (c) an attempt to show how methodological issues have been interwoven with the substantive concerns of social development researchers.

Three Eras of Social Development Research

Few scholarly fields yield easily to simple chronological accounts. Social development is no exception. Cairns and Cairns’s (2006) division of the first century of developmental psychology into three periods provides useful markers, with slight adjustments for social development: emergence (roughly 1890–1919), the middle period of institutionalization and expansion (1920–1946), and the modern era (from 1947 to the present). These broad divisions reveal striking variations in the degree to which systematic theoretical perspectives influenced the dominant questions and methods of social development research.

Emergence

Interest in the phenomena of social development suffuses early accounts of childhood, from the writings of philosophers to the writings of diarists and social historians (e.g., Darwin, 1877; Shinn, 1893–1899). Systematic scientific study began only in the final decade of the nineteenth century (White, 1992). Among the early efforts were Hall’s questionnaire studies focusing on “(a) simple automatisms, instincts, and attitudes, (b) the small child’s activities and feelings, (c) control of emotions and will,” and the like (White, 1992, p. 29). In the same decade, studies of peer collaboration (Triplett, 1897) and similarity between friends’ attitudes and values (Barnes, 1896–1897, 1902–1903; Monroe, 1899) appeared. The interests of these early researchers, if not their methods and interpretations, thus are strikingly like the topics that preoccupy researchers at the beginning of the 21st century.

Middle period

Initially, concern with theory in social development research was slight, at best. Researchers generally shared the view that “nascent social competences were … among the child’s endowments, and the work of the scientist was to chart their unfolding” (Hartup, 1992, p. 107). This situation changed as views of psychological research shifted and as strong formal theories from other fields penetrated the study of social development. These converging forces asserted that experience, not merely the unfolding of natural endowments, was an essential element in development. The most commanding figure in American psychology at this time, Watson (1913), declared that learning alone accounted for development, effectively challenging the suppositions underlying most work in the field up to that point.

The orientation to environmental forces in behavior and development intensified as psychoanalytic propositions permeated the literature. Although of greatest interest to clinical and personality psychologists, Freud’s ideas further pressed social researchers to consider the nature and substance of socialization, or “the processes through which the child is assimilated into society” (Hartup, 1992, p. 107; Maccoby, 1992a, 1992b). Similar pressures emanated from sociological theories, such as symbolic interactionism (Cooley, 1909; Mead, 1934), that were concerned with how developmentally advanced individuals contribute to child growth and development. The interest in socialization born in this period dominated social development research from the 1930s until the 1960s and remains a salient theme today. Among its early ramifications were an emphasis on parental influences and a relative neglect of interactions with peers, who were thought to lack the experience and authority to serve as socializing agents (Hartup, 1992).

The modern era

The most recent sea change occurred in the 1960s with the renascence of structuralist ideas. Piaget’s theory emphasized the significance of social processes and the role of the child as an active agent in development (Flavell, 1963). Without denying the role of authority figures in early development, Piaget (1932/1965) took the view that children most readily experienced the cognitive conflict necessary for developmental change when interacting with peers. Kohlberg (1969), in a germinal chapter on stage and sequence in social development, further developed the notion of cognitive conflict as a necessary ingredient of movement from one stage to another and peers as ideal social resources for this process. Kohlberg’s essay remains the major marker of a shift to theory encompassing both social environments and a child actively operating on those elements.

Piaget’s and Kohlberg’s writings gave rise to a new interest among social developmentalists in a normative descriptive account of social cognitive functioning (e.g., Selman, 1980). For many researchers, however, issues of socialization and the prediction of social behavior remained salient (e.g., Dunn, 1992; Harris, 1992), raising the possibility that cognitive activity was central to other aspects of social development. Three current directions in the field have resulted from this impetus: (a) increasing interest in the ways in which children regulate their own behavior and emotions, (b) attention to biological processes in control and regulation, and (c) a conviction that the dyad is an essential unit of analysis in social development.

What Is Social Development the Development Of? Historical Determinants

Over the first century of social development research, the answer to the question “What is social development the development of?” changed in concert not only with shifting theoretical emphases but also with changing societal views of optimal behavior (Beatty, Cahan, & Grant, 2006; Kagan, 1992; Sears, 1975). Early studies of children focused on the qualities of independence, intelligence, honesty, and sociability largely because “wise commentators in America were certain” that these qualities represented the ideal culmination of development (Kagan, 1992, p. 992). In an era with little theoretical commitment, social values determined the typical set of outcome variables of interest in psychological research.

As psychoanalytic theory and its offshoots became more dominant, other variables become more salient. The classic longitudinal studies of the 1920s and 1930s, for example, focused on social and mastery variables. Among these were dependence, independence, aggression to peers and parents, achievement, anxiety, and sociability. All have demonstrable connections to Freudian theory and the related shift to primary interest in parental socialization and children’s social dispositions and control of emotions. An interesting corollary is the significance of these assumptions for the salience of particular parenting variables. Before World War II, when most mothers stayed at home, concerns about child-rearing problems tended toward fears about overprotectiveness, encouragement of dependency, and discouragement of age-appropriate independence. In this case, the psychodynamically influenced concerns with independence and emotional control accorded with typical rearing circumstances for middle-class American children (Kagan, 1992).

By the 1960s, a driving vision of the active child further redirected scientific attention. Interest increased in children’s concepts of self, others, and the interrelation of the two (Kohlberg, 1969; Selman, 1980) and in constructs such as intentions and causal attributions (e.g., Dodge, 1986; Dweck, 1986). Growing attention to biological processes and related constructs (e.g., temperament) led to greater focus on regulation of behavior, including coping, inhibition, and attention (Eisenberg, 2002; Rothbart & Bates, 2006). Research on social behavior gradually shifted attention to dyadic interactions as regulatory contexts, and constructs of relationship became more central. Rather than focusing on issues of dependence and anxiety alone, researchers also attended to parents’ sensitive responding, signs of emotional security, and measures of relationship quality (Hartup & Laursen, 1999; Thompson, 2006).

Changes in economic and social patterns relevant to development and child rearing exerted further pressures on research questions. The preoccupation with assuring independence and emotional control seemed less relevant when more than half of the mothers in the United States were in the labor force. Public concerns shifted toward the prospect that increasing numbers of children might experience insufficient parental affection and sensitivity toward the child, thus giving issues of attachment, the quality of out-of-home care, and the emotional life of the child considerable currency in the public arena as well as in social development research. Concerns about the greater likelihood of parental inattention also extended to fears of less supervision and monitoring of children, which in turn focused widespread attention to developmental problems of poor regulation and psychopathology (Beatty et al., 2006; Kagan, 1992).

Transformations in Social Development Research

The breadth of social development research today cannot be subsumed easily by a few common themes. Yet most of the activity in the field reflects four intellectual and empirical transformations during its first century. These include increasing interest in specifying developmental processes and intraindividual processes, understanding the nature and significance of interpersonal contexts in development, identifying the dynamics of interpersonal experience, and recognizing the significance of variations in extrafamilial social contexts.

Specifying developmental processes

The maturationist assumptions of researchers stemmed both from a naïve psychology of natural endowments and from an interest in the practical ramifications of “child study” (Hartup et al., 2002). Hall, for example, emphasized that the study of children was valuable for gaining insights that might eventually inform efforts to enhance their development (Cairns & Cairns, 2006; White, 1992). Careful description was a useful first step, and the descriptive work of the middle period was generally more rigorous than in the early period. This later work was facilitated by substantial investment in research by funding agencies like the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial and the Payne Fund, which shared the goal of improving the lives of children (e.g., Senn, 1975). Diverse scientists contributed to the advances of this period. Bühler (1927, 1930) conducted compelling observational studies demonstrating the truly social nature of infants’ behavior; Goodenough (1929, 1931) studied children’s emotional upset during testing and fears by children of different ages; and Shirley (1931, 1933) published a three-volume report of a pioneering short-term longitudinal study of motor, intellectual, and personality development in the first 2 years of life. In perhaps the most striking empirical advance of the period, two scholars of religion, Hartshorne and May (1928–1930), produced a series of experimental observational studies showing that moral behavior was highly situation specific.

The search for developmental processes

The essential work of developing sound research methods preempted the energies needed for developing and testing theories during the middle period (Cairns & Cairns, 2006; White, 2002). Bühler’s (1931) review of studies of children’s social behavior, barely 35 years after the first published work on social development, culminated in her judgment that these early studies failed because of “the lack of a systematic point of view” (p. 392). In neglecting theoretical development, social development researchers fell behind other developmental psychologists of the middle period. With the challenges to naïve maturationist views from behaviorism and psychoanalytic ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Wiley-Blackwell Handbooks of Developmental Psychology
• Title page
• Copyright page
• List of Contributors
• Introduction by the Editors
• Part I: Historical Overview
• Part II: Disciplinary Perspectives on Social Development
• Part III: Ecological Contexts for Social Development
• Part IV: Child and Contextual Factors in Social Development
• Part V: Family Context
• Part VI: Peer Group
• Part VII: Play, Cooperation, Competition, Aggression, and Bullying
• Part VIII: Cognition, Helping, and Moral Reasoning
• Part IX: Intervening in Social Development
• Index