Charles M. Super - US grants

The long-term goal of this study is to expand our knowledge of the early development of arousal, attentional and affective behaviors, especially as they are shaped by culturally specific caretaking practices. The research design will capitalize on a natural experiment in parallel communities in the Netherlands and the USA. Two groups of infants (60 in each community) will be followed from shortly after birth until age 2 years. Assessment procedures include parent interviews, diaries, and actigraph recordings of daily activities and rest, samples of salivary cortisol at specified times of the day, behavior observations in the home, parental ratings of temperament, evaluation of reactivity and adaptation to developmentally appropriate challenges, and reactions to DPT inoculations. Included for these latter two procedures is monitoring of autonomic nervous system functioning (heart rate) and endocrine functioning (cortisol). The project has three specific goals: 1) To replicate and extend, with a longitudinal design, conclusions established in previous cross-cultural comparisons regarding community differences in the amount and patterning of sleep, daytime arousal, management of attention, and affective expression during the first two years of life. These differences appear to correspond to the way parents in the two communities interact with their babies and organize daily life for them; 2) To examine in greater detail the involvement of biologic mechanisms in the developmental pathways identified, particularly those involving autonomic functioning and activity of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis; 3) To arrive at a clearer understanding of diversity in normative biobehavioral development as regulated through cultural processes. The product of this study will be new knowledge about how culturally organized environments interact over time with developing biological and behavioral systems to yield specific developmental outcomes. The results will inform current discussion about the causes of poor arousal regulation, attentional difficulty, sleep deprivation, and their consequences for social, cognitive, and self-regulatory functioning in the preschool years.

Abstract

The Center for the Study of Culture, Health and Children's Development:
Proposal for a Planning Grant

Sara Harkness and Charles Super

The majority of issues affecting children's health, development and well-being today demand a more interdisciplinary approach than has been characteristic of developmental research in the past. Rapidly increasing awareness of cultural variability in the environments of children's development has led to a call for more contextually oriented research paradigms; but the continuing pressures of disciplinary constituencies make it difficult to build collaborative work across their boundaries. The present project is to support planning and development for a Center for the Study of Culture, Health and Children's Development at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. The proposed Center will build on existing interdisciplinary collaborative relationships among researchers, educators, practitioners and students, with the goal of increasing understanding of children's health and development in cultural context. We expect that the work of this Center will make significant contributions to scientific knowledge and to the improvement of the lives of children and their families in a variety of circumstances.
Although the principal investigators have extensive research experience in the area of culture, health and human development, a planning grant is needed to support the development of a larger, coordinated program of research projects on the cultural mediation of children's healthy development. Specifically, we are requesting funding for three related activities:
1) A major planning conference, to be held in October 2001 at the University of Connecticut, which will bring together the 25 faculty members associated with this proposal, plus selected graduate students. The purpose of the conference will be to explore common areas of interest and expertise in the intersections of culture, health and children's development, and to define focal topics or issues for the development of new research. One outcome of this conference will, consequently, be the formation of several (we anticipate four) working groups who will continue to collaborate together in preparing specific research proposals that will involve coordination and funding through the proposed Center.
2) Four smaller working conferences, to be held during the winter of 2001, focused on each of the focal research topics defined at the major fall conference. Based on previous work and current interests of participating faculty, we anticipate that these topics will include the cultural regulation of sleep and arousal in infancy, goodness of fit between young children's temperaments and their culturally constituted environments of care, attentional and stress-related disorders of middle childhood across several ethnic and cultural groups, and cultural/social factors in school success (or lack thereof) for children as they approach the transition to adolescence. Although research in each of these areas will require special expertise (e.g. measurement of biological markers of stress and reactivity for research on infant sleep and arousal), the projects will be linked through the use of a common theoretical framework for integrating diverse developmental, biological and cultural data (e.g. the "developmental niche" of Super and Harkness or the "developmental microniche"of Worthman). Efforts will be made, thus, to ensure that the structure of inquiry and the methods of data collection and analysis for each project are as consistent as possible, creating a synergy among them.
3) Because the proposed Center will be a context for training as well as research, we will bring in speakers for a faculty/student research seminar, to be held bi-weekly throughout the spring semester 2002. This seminar, modeled on the Culture, Health and Human Development seminar that has been held for the past three years, will provide an ongoing context for communication and mutual education among the diverse faculty and students affiliated with the Center. We anticipate that at least some of the speakers in this seminar will also contribute to the development of thinking related to the selected focal research topics.