Mothers from inner-city, poor families with high-risk infants were interviewed when their infants were three months of age concerning sources of support (e.g., fathers, relatives, friends) and types of support received (e.g., goods, services, advice, financial support). Observations of the mother-infant interaction in a free-play setting were also…

Effective family problem solving was studied in 97 families of elementary-school-aged children with definite- and indefinite-solution tasks. Incentive and task independence were manipulated. It was found that definitions of effective problem solving based on directly observed measures of group interaction were more valid than definitions based on…

Relationships among social cognition, social interaction, and general cognition were studied in 109 three-year-old children. Social cognition was assessed by seven frequently used tests; general cognition was gauged by the McCarthy Scales of Children's Abilities. Social interaction was observed while each child played with a friend in a laboratory…

Studies influences and interrelations of family dynamics and of varying quality of child-care on the child's capacity for compliance and self-regulation. Multiple regression techniques were used to examine relationships between child care, family, and child and parent behaviors. (Author/DR)

This study investigated the range of communicative intentions (CIs) used by 3 hearing teachers and 11 preschool children with hearing losses in a lesson context. The study found that teachers used all the following CI categories: conversational devices, descriptions, performatives, requests, responses, statements, and uninterpretables. Only 7…

The Infant Parent Social Interaction Code was developed to measure infant-parent interaction utilizing four parent variables, four infant variables, and one dyadic variable for which operational definitions were developed. Preliminary and validation studies with a total of 232 infants and toddlers suggest the measure reveals important interactive…

Questions asked by parents of 12 young hearing children were compared with those asked by hearing parents of 17 preschoolers with deafness who used various linguistic input models (i.e., oral English only, cued speech, signed/manual English). Similar parent questioning strategies were found among groups matched for mean length of utterance.…

The Psychological Maltreatment Rating Scales (PMRS) were developed for assessing psychological maltreatment in the mother-child interaction, and were used to rate the videotaped interaction of 49 high-risk mother-child dyads and predict child protective service involvements. The PMRS was found to be a moderately reliable and valid measure.…

This study investigated potential effects of auditory and other communicative experience on development of visual attention in 80 infants (tested at 9, 12, and 18 months), half deaf and half with deaf mothers. Results indicate that early visual attention is associated with and potentially influenced by a complex interaction of maturation,…

Developmental research and educational practice involve conversations between children and adults. The conversational aspects of these situations have rarely been occasions for reflection. Discrepancies between the child's expectations and the adult's intentions can lead to misunderstanding, for example, at school or during a research interview.…

This paper describes data gathering and analytic procedures, and then presents examples regarding how each fits into the naturalistic research model. From the interactionist perspective, called symbolic interactionism, meaning is of central importance. Naturalistic inquiry is a way of doing social science research which provides the methodological…

Investigated the influence of dominance and friendship on behavior in a cooperative/competitive problem-solving situation among preschool peers. Mixture of quasi-agonistic and opportunistic behaviors led to high resource use; agonistic behaviors were infrequent and unrelated to resource use. (Author/RWB)

Longitudinal videotape recordings of six young children with autism and six age- and language-matched children with Down syndrome in structured play with their mothers were analyzed. Findings of reduced expression of positive affect by autistic subjects suggest that their known deficits in attention and affective responsiveness persisted even in…

Analysis of communicative exchanges between 24 children (ages 2-3) with Down syndrome and their mothers found that the quality of children's responses was highly associated with the degree to which the mothers' requests were related to the child's current activity and matched or were below the child's current developmental level. (DB)

Symbolic interactionism is a theoretical framework that derives from critical humanism through social psychology and is presented as an alternative to sociological and psychological views of social reality. This paper analyzes the general arguments of symbolic interactionism, its portrayal of people as responsible agents, and its interpretive…