Cultural transmission Flashcards
Socialization
Learning and internalizing rules and patterns of behaviors that are affected by cultures
- socialization is more about the formal processes
Enculturation
Youngsters learing and adopting ways and manners of their specific culture
- enculturation is more about the content that is actually acquired
Universal
Humans want to be competent, productive adults and members of their group. It is different to every person what it means to be competent and productive
Agents
teachers, peers, friends, siblings and family etc.
Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems
Individual
Microsystem: Direct influence on individual –> family, friends and siblings
Mesosystem: connections between microsystems
Exosystem: Indirect influence on individual –> extended family, school, media, neighbors
Macrosystem: maatschappelijke normen en waarden –> law, history, economics, culture
Nuclear family
Two adults and one child
Prototyping in many Western countries
–> few differnces in emotional closeness, geographic distance, contact
Extended family
Parents, children, grandparents
Prototyping in many Non-Western countries
–> closer (both emotionally and geographically) in protorypically collectivist contexts
Family structure change
- siblings of grandparents/ great-grandparents
- were families bigger
- what were the gender roles
- who took care of the children
- why do you have children
High SES parents in helping cultural transmission
More educated/ educational opporunities - answer children’s questions in a more elaborated manner; guided interaction is more important
Low SES parents in cultural transmission
Less willingness to guide their children, and rather leave them to themselves, learn as you go
Norms, customes, child care: parental ethnotheories
Parents have ideas about how their children should grow up
What is normal/what is encouraged varies across cultures
- rocking/thumb-sucking: discouraged by south African mothers/ normal for native African mothers
- parental expectations differ in terms of when the child should have accomplished a developmental task
- effects of parental ethnotheories and parenting on cognition and behavior –> red-dot mirror self recognition
Temperament in children
- easy child: agreeable, quite positive in terms of mood and quite responsive
- fussy/difficult child: qithdawn from interactions and is characterized by bad moods
- slow to warm up child: once warmed up is actually making nice transitions and is very positive and responsive as well
Goodness of fit
- match between temperament and context
- what might be difficult in one setting can be protective/appropriate in another
Bias in construct and methods
- attachment
- parental sensitivity may not mean the same
- strange situation test (Ainsworth)
Bias in construct and methods
- Piaget’s stage model
- cultural differences in reaching stages
- is the ultimate stage (scientific reasoning/formal operational) equally valued across cultures?
Modernization theory
The modernization perspective claims that inter-generational dependencies (family interdependence) should decrease and separation/ nucleation within the family should increase with socio-economic development, pointing to a convergence toward the Western nucleated independent family, a core of the individualistic society
–> that people will become more Western when they change into a more industrialized and urbanized context
Kagitcibasi
Modernization theory/convergence hypothesis cannot be the whole story
- value of children (VOC) study
- economic/utilitarian (majority world)
- psychological (minority world) value of children
- family model of interdependence/independence/psychological interdependence