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Key Words
Culture ` Development ` Using culture
Abstract
This paper asks how an interest in culture and in development can be com-
bined to the benefit of both and at the level of theory and procedures. Three
steps are considered, noting for each some existing moves and some recom-
mended extensions. The first step has to do with the sampling of people. Here
the main existing move has been toward greater social diversity in sampling.
The extensions have to do with giving closer attention to the bases for choice,
the subjects view of events, within-group diversity or consensus, and ones
own culture. The second step has to do with sampling tasks and situations. Here
the existing moves have been toward the greater use of everyday tasks, life-
course problems, and tasks that involve two or more people: all shifts based on
changes in concepts of ability and its bases. The extensions have to do with
considering larger groups (going beyond dyads), the impact of audiences, the
expectations people hold about appropriate contributions to shared tasks, and
the conceptual bases for choice. The third step consists of alertness to unex-
pected or missing pieces in data or theory. It is illustrated by progressions
within research by Peggy Miller and by the author and her colleagues (e.g., pro-
gressions in the latter case from Piagetian tasks to parents concepts of devel-
opment and household divisions of labour).
Copyright 2002 S. Karger AG, Basel
1
My first training was in psychology only (University of Sydney). A first broadening came from a
PhD in Harvards Department of Social Relations: a department requiring courses in anthropology and
sociology as well as psychology. Further broadening came from seeing in practice how people outside
the usual Anglo-Saxon mainstream responsed to standard tasks. That exposure sparked a continuing
concern with the way people in any social group interpret tasks, define intelligence, ability or develop-
ment, and view some ways of learning, teaching, and problem-solving as better than others. It also
sparked the recognition that these issues are as relevant to ones own social group as to those consid-
ered as other. My main teaching appointments have been at George Washington University and at
Macquarie University (Sydney), with each marked by a search for ways to combine social and non-
social approaches to the nature and bases of performance and development.
The main reason is that this would enrich developmental research. An immedi-
ate benefit would be assistance in dealing with the emerging search for ways to
define contexts and to specify their links to development. More broadly, adding
considerations of culture would open up developmental psychology, would change
the way it proceeds, challenge its assumptions, and prompt new questions and new
ways of interpreting what we observe. The addition could also have social and po-
litical benefits. It could, for example, make more visible the presence of diversity
and more relevant many of the applications to policy (especially where these refer
to social groups other than ones own).
A further hope is that developmental psychology will move toward more dy-
namic views of culture and its links to development. For many developmentalists,
culture seems to imply only a particular sampling procedure: the study of groups
seen as distant and exotic or one step forward of ethnic or racial groups
within ones own national borders. Far less often, there is the recognition that an
interest in culture can lead to looking in a new way at ones own social group or at
the nature of development in general. To produce change, we need then to find
ways of respecting the meanings already in place but at the same time ways of
moving toward the broader view.
It is easy to say that whatever we do should have some link to general devel-
opmental theory. It is easy to say also that it is not enough to choose a group simply
because it is different and might answer questions about the extent to which re-
sults generalize. How do we work toward both working from theory and feeding
back to some general theory?
One step toward this goal consists of becoming aware of some current ac-
counts of how development in context proceeds and of moving back and forth
between these accounts and any particular sampling of people or of situations. As-
sume, for example, that what provokes ones interest is the presence of some spe-
cific difference in practices: in the everyday ways of telling stories, talking to chil-
dren, keeping them close or letting them run, putting them to sleep, showing them
what to do, encouraging their participation in activities or in social groups. Explor-
ing that kind of difference should be linked to views of culture as a set of practices
and to questions about the sources and impact of particular routines. One example
is provided by Rogoffs position paper in this set and by her earlier work on guided
participation [e.g., Rogoff, Mistry, Goncu, and Mosier, 1993]. The several chapters
in Goodnow, Miller, and Kessel [1995] provide a number of others.
Practices are not the only ways by which one might link a specific aspect of
similarity or difference to a general view of culture and development. The framing
view of development and culture may be in terms of people coming to share mean-
ings, models, views of the world, categories of objects or of people. The groups we
choose may then be groups that illustrate particular differences in views of the
world (e.g., in what counts as a moral act) or particular circumstances influencing
the likelihood of shared meanings within a group (e.g., emigration as a possible
influence on the likelihood of shared views between parents and children). The
framing view may also be one of culture as consisting of multiple worlds, with
development then consisting of learning to bridge these worlds or to navigate the
borders [Cooper, 1999]: a framing that links well to sampling groups that face
References
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nectedness in adolescent development. In A. Masten (Ed.), Minnesota symposium on child devel-
opment: Cultural processes in development (pp. 2557). Hillsdale NJ: Erlbaum.