Why the Social Sciences Matter

Jonathan Michie, Cary Cooper

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137269928
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Published with the support of the Academy for Social Sciences, this volume provides an illuminating look at topics of concern to everyone at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Leading social scientists tackle complex questions such as immigration, unemployment, climate change, war, banks in trouble, and an ageing population.

1

Social Science, Parenting and Child Development

Pasco Fearon, Chloe Campbell and Lynne Murray

Introduction

Securing and promoting the welfare and healthy development of children should be one of the fundamental priorities, and challenges, for all societies. Despite notable progressive national initiatives, global policy statements, aid programmes and grassroots campaigns that are focused on children’s health and wellbeing, many children continue to be exposed to major impediments to their optimal development, including poor parental care, outright abuse and neglect, domestic violence, poorly managed parental mental illness, displacement, poverty and lack of access to high quality educational, intellectual and creative opportunities (Walker et al., 2011). Very cogent arguments have been made that intervention in early child development can reap disproportionately higher returns in social and economic benefits than interventions focused on later periods of the lifespan (Heckman, 2008). Few would deny that the prevention of mental health problems, psychological distress, educational dropout and underachievement, unemployment and social maladjustment is better than cure. However, effective prevention requires a systematic understanding of the developmental mechanisms of maladjustment and a rigorous analysis of what interventions work, and for whom. These, in turn, hinge on critical analysis, rigorous measurement, good theory and carefully executed research.

Social science has a vital role to play in this arena: in systematically documenting the experiences and outcomes of children; in understanding the proximal (those impinging directly on the child) and distal (those contextual factors supporting or maintaining proximal effects on the child) mechanisms that affect children’s development; and in developing and evaluating interventions and policies for changing children’s lives for the better.

The ways in which social science has already contributed to children’s health and development are too numerous to cover in a short chapter. Instead, we focus on just two examples by way of illustration to show the rigorous, conceptually coherent and principled approaches that social scientists offer for advancing our understanding of child development and delivering new and better ways of promoting children’s outcomes across the globe. Inevitably, we are not able to cover the many crucial areas of social science that have made just as much of a contribution as the examples we have chosen. Social science, for example, has produced vital research on typically developing children’s language acquisition, peer relations, intellectual development, educational attainment and learning, citizenship and moral development, as well as the development and needs of children with disabilities. All of these domains of research are rich in scientific data and theory, and have been translated into effective social and educational interventions. Social scientists have also initiated some of the most important large-scale surveys that have given the public and policy-makers vital insights into the health, experiences, needs and opinions of children in our societies, such as the UK Household Longitudinal Study (Bradshaw, Keung, Rees and Goswami, 2011), the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (Golding, 1990) and the Millennium Cohort Study (e.g., Sabates and Dex, 2012) in the UK or the NICHD Study of Early Childcare and Youth Development (NICHD, 2005) and the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (e.g., Xue and Meisels, 2004) in the US. UNICEF’s report on the quality of childhood, for example, employed social research methods to illustrate the poor standing of the UK on a range of indicators of quality of life for children, including relative poverty and family breakdown (Adamson, 2013). Further UNICEF findings have highlighted how children in the UK feel caught in a ‘materialist trap’ and do not spend enough time with their families (Ipsos-MORI and Nairn, 2011). A recent carefully conducted report by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) analysed data from a range of national databases in order to track trends in the extent and reporting of child abuse by region across the UK, with a view to developing a consistent methodology for monitoring rates of abuse annually across the country (Harker et al., 2013). Data of this nature could provide vital information for health and social care policy. Thorough scientific evidence is also critical in testing the effectiveness of intervention programmes aimed at promoting child development, and in determining how resources should be channelled so that the best outcomes for children can be achieved. In that context, social science methodology has played a leading role in rigorously evaluating the outcomes of major child development initiatives, such as the US Head Start Programme, the UK’s SureStart Programme, the UK’s recent National Evaluation of the Nurse Family Partnership, and Multi-Systemic Therapy for At-Risk Teens. While many of these national projects are supported by research funding agencies, quite a number are also funded directly by government departments, a fact which in itself illustrates both the importance of social science for supporting governmental health and social care strategies, and also the importance, and fruitfulness, of close partnership between academic institutions and government.

While the emphasis in this chapter is on social science, we would want to emphasise that child development research is fundamentally interdisciplinary and the best research – past, current and future – involves the creative team-working of researchers from a broad range of disciplines including psychologists, sociologists, biomedical scientists (neuroscience, physiology, genetics, pharmacology), epidemiologists, economists and statisticians. We strongly believe that the interdisciplinary character of child development research is vital for its continuing vigour as a field.

Mindful of the very incomplete picture we are able to paint of social science’s contribution to this area, in this chapter we review two inter-related topics that we have been particularly involved in for some time: 1) parent–child attachment; 2) postnatal depression, and in each case we use the findings to elucidate broader conclusions regarding parenting and its influences on development. In doing so, we hope to show how social scientific thinking and research methods tackle questions of child development and where these fields are taking us in the future.

Parent–child attachment

Attachment theory is arguably the most influential account of the role played by the parent–child relationship in child development. Developed originally by the British Psychiatrist John Bowlby (Bowlby, 1969), it represents a unique integration of thinking from developmental psychology, evolutionary psychology, cognitive science and ethology. According to this model, a primary function (in the evolutionary sense) of a child’s bond with his/her primary caregivers is to ensure the child’s safety and protection against threats to his/her survival during the very protracted period of juvenile immaturity that characterises human development. Through a series of mechanisms that are still not completely understood, over the first year of life young infants develop stable and selective bonds to one or more consistent caregiving figures who they then selectively seek out in times of stress. During such times of stress or threat, the child’s ‘attachment system’ is thought to be activated, which sets in motion a series of coordinated behaviours (supported by underlying physiology) whose function is to bring about proximity to a primary attachment figure. Once proximity is achieved, the child’s sense of threat diminishes and the attachment system is deactivated, in what is conceptualised in an explicitly homeostatic fashion. Children enlist a rich, flexible and developmentally changing array of behaviours and communications in order to bring about proximity to a caregiver when stressed, from calling, crying and seeking in early life, to sophisticated communication and negotiation in later development.

A major impetus to the scientific study of attachment came from the work of the American psychologist Mary Ainsworth, who developed a pioneering structured observational tool for systematically measuring attachment behaviour in the laboratory, known as the Strange Situation Procedure (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, and Wall, 1978). This 21-minute procedure consists of a series of brief episodes in which natural cues to danger are presented to infants, including the appearance of a stranger and two brief periods when they are separated from their parent. These cues are assumed to activate the child’s attachment system and provide opportunity for the researcher to observe how the child’s attachment behaviour is expressed and particularly the way in which it appears to be organised to bring about proximity to, and gain comfort from, the attachment figure. Ainsworth’s major discovery was that infants in the second year of life show marked and surprising variations in their attachment behaviour under these conditions. The majority, referred to as ‘secure’ or just ‘B-type’ behave as one would expect given the functions ascribed to attachment discussed above: when secure infants are separated they actively call and seek their caregiver, and upon reunion they quickly establish contact, which is effective in diminishing their distress and facilitating their return to exploration and play. A second category of infants, known as avoidant or type-A, show limited calling and seeking during separation, and actively avoid contact with the parent upon reunion, despite the fact that physiological markers suggest that they are equally aroused by the separation as other infants (Spangler and Grossmann, 1993; Sroufe and Waters, 1977; Zelenko et al., 2005). A third category, known as resistant or type-C, show marked distress when separated from a carer but upon reunion are unable to get comfort from their caregiver efficiently, either actively resisting contact when it is offered (e.g., angrily pushing away) or, less commonly, listlessly crying without seeking the parent’s support.

These patterns of attachment behaviour are believed to represent adaptations on the part of the child to differences in the quality of parental care, and specifically in how responsive the caregiver is to the child’s attachment signals, and how appropriate the parent’s responses are. A fourth category was identified some time later by Mary Main and Judith Solomon (Main and Solomon, 1990), and is referred to as Disorganised or type-D. These infants appear unable to orchestrate a coherent way of dealing with the separation and reunion experience and show extended or momentary contradictory behaviours, such as seeking the parent and then strongly avoiding her, or freezing, stilling or rocking. These patterns of behaviour are thought to arise as a consequence of highly insensitive or frightening parental behaviour (Lyons-Ruth, Bronfman and Parsons, 1999; van IJzendoorn, Schuengel and Bakermans-Kranenburg, 1999).

Two key strands of attachment research have attempted to a) determine the nature of the environmental factors influencing the development of individual differences in attachment and b) charting the long-term consequences of these variations for children’s socio-emotional development and liability to psychological disorder. In so doing, attachment research has gathered a host of evidence relevant to determining the potential of attachment as a productive target for intervention and prevention programmes. In the sections below we provide an inevitably selective summary of the findings of these studies and provide some examples of intervention studies that have arisen from research on attachment.

Environmental influences on attachment

A question of fundamental importance for the interpretation of the individual differences in attachment behaviour is whether they do indeed represent variations caused by environmental differences and not differences caused by the child’s inherited genetic characteristics. Three key studies using samples of mono- and dizygotic twins have provided collectively compelling evidence that genetically-based variation in attachment behaviour in infants and toddlers is minimal (Bokhorst et al., 2003; O’Connor and Croft, 2001; Roisman and Fraley, 2008). For example, in one well-known study (Bokhorst et al., 2003), the estimate of heritability for attachment security in infants using the Strange Situation Procedure was zero, and all of the variance was attributable in roughly equal measure to the shared environment (environmental effects that make twins similar to each other) and the non-shared environment (environmental effects that make them different). Furthermore, although some early small-scale studies suggested that insecure attachment, and disorganised attachment in particular, might be linked to certain gene polymorphisms (Lakatos et al., 2000), larger scale studies that focused on rigorous replication have failed to find any robust evidence of genetic association (Luijk et al., 2011). Collectively, a solid body of evidence thus testifies to one of the basic tenets of attachment theory, namely that variations in the organisation of attachment behaviour in early life are caused by the environment.

Since Ainsworth’s pioneering early work, a host of studies have been conducted that have attempted to test the idea that the key environmental factor may be differences in the appropriateness and responsiveness of the parent to the child’s attachment cues (referred to generally as the parent’s ‘sensitivity’). These studies, involving a wide range of procedures for directly observing mother–infant interaction, have been conducted in many countries around the world, and consistently uphold Ainsworth’s original contention. Meta-analytic work has shown that the average effect size for these studies is equivalent to a correlation of r = .21 based on over 4000 independently sampled families (Cohen’s d = .43), which is highly statistically significant (De Wolff and van IJzendoorn, 1997). This robust association is nevertheless moderate in size and although methodological factors undoubtedly play a substantial role in attenuating the observed association (such as the relatively brief observational periods often used when assessing sensitivity, and more generally the inherent measurement error in assessments of attachment and sensitivity), researchers have also taken this to imply that other factors, not well captured by the concept of behavioural sensitivity, must also play a part in the development of attachment. One particularly promising area of research has emerged in the last decade that is helping to shed further light on the processes that shape infants’ attachments. Researchers are becoming increasingly interested in the way that parents think about their child, and particularly their capacity to imagine and make sense of their child’s psychological states, such as their thoughts, feelings, motivations or focus of attention. For example, Slade and colleagues (2005) have developed an in-depth interview for parents regarding their relationship with their baby, which they carefully code for the degree and sophistication of mental state thinking that is apparent in their responses. The quality of the parent’s capacities for reflectiveness, as measured in this way, has been found to predict later attachment security as well as the mother’s parenting (Slade et al., 2005). Oppenheim, Koren-Karie and Sagi (2001), similarly, elicit parents’ thoughts about their child by showing them clips of video recordings of them interacting with their child. Structured interview questions probe for parent’s thinking about their baby’s thoughts and feelings, which are again coded for the richness of their insights about their baby. Two separate studies from this group have also found this measure of maternal insightfulness to predict the infant’s later attachment security (Koren-Karie, Oppenheim, Dolev, Sher and Etzion-Carasso, 2002; Oppenheim et al., 2001). Meins and colleagues have conducted perhaps the most comprehensive series of studies on the role of parental ‘mind-mindedness’ and attachment, by coding any spontaneous mind-related statements that parents make during their interactions with their infants. Four separate studies (Laranjo, Bernier and Meins, 2008; Lundy, 2003; Meins et al., 2012; Meins, Fernyhough, Fradley and Tuckey, 2001) have found that the tendency to treat the child as an individual with a mind, as reflected in the use of appropriate mind-related comments during interactions, is predictive of attachment security. In all these studies, the typical effects sizes are consistently and substantially higher than the meta-analytic average mentioned previously. Through detailed observational and interview-based studies, using carefully constructed and reliable coded methods, studies in this area have thus helped reveal some of the key features of the care-giving environment that appear to promote the development of secure attachment relationships and suggest a set of well-defined targets for preventi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction and Overview
• 1  Social Science, Parenting and Child Development
• 2  Health and Wellbeing
• 3  Climate Change and Society
• 4  Waste, Resource Recovery and Labour: Recycling Economies in the EU
• 5  Poverty and Inequality
• 6  The Economy, Financial Stability and Sustainable Growth
• 7  What Can the Social Sciences Bring to an Understanding of Food Security?
• 8  Numbers and Questions: The Contribution of Social Science to Understanding the Family, Marriage and Divorce
• 9  Crime, Policing and Compliance with the Law
• 10  Understanding the Arab Spring
• 11  International Migration
• Index