An Approach to Defining Mother-Child Interaction Styles

Abstract

The study describes the development of a method for coding and recording the objective non-verbal interactions which take place between preschool-aged children and their mothers. Trained observers speak the codes into one channel of a stereophonic tape recorder while the verbal interactions are simultaneously being recorded on the other channel. Illustrative data from two culturally advantaged and two culturally disadvantaged subject pairs were analyzed in terms of the avenues by which they communicated to demonstrate that the quantitative measures have sufficient consistency on two comparable occasions to warrant applying detailed pattern and sequence analysis techniques.

Mother‐infant interaction: The stability of emotional expression during infants’ sixth to eighth month

“…The present findings are supportive of the research of Kogan and Wimberger (1966) who established that there was some degree of consistency or stability of individual differences in mother's laboratory interactions with their three to five year old children. More specifically, Kogan and Wimberger found a degree of individual consistency in subject's verbal and non-verbal behaviour, where such behaviour was subsequently used to rate subjects' on the "warmth-hostility" and "dominance-submission" dimensions.…”

“…Intensive small-n studies are now typical of the developmental literature (e.g. Bronson, 1974;Kogan & Wimberger, 1966;Russell, 1983). As Russell notes the results of such studies cannot be easily generalized but they serve (a) important hypotheses generating functions (b) help clarify methodology (c) confirm trends and (d) test the application of general theories in individual cases.…”

BEVRECS: A general-purpose system for making and analyzing behavior stream protocols

“…The behavior recording system (BEVRECS) to be described here is an artificial language and quantitative analytical method that was designed initially by Ruth A. Bobbitt at the Regional Primate Research Center, University of Washington, for the laboratory study of behavior among mother and infant monkeys (Bobbitt, Jensen and Gordon, 1964). It has been generalized for use with other species in the laboratory; it has been given a field trial in a naturalistic study of baboons in Africa; and it has been and is being used in laboratory studies of mother-infant interactions among humans (Kogan and Wimberger, 1966). In March 1972, I completed a ten-month field study of social behavior among a small population of Aboriginal people of the Alyawara Tribe in Central Australia, with much further generalization, development, and testing of BEVRECS as one of the basic objectives of the project (Denham, 1973).…”

Social Dialectics and Language: Mother and Child Construct the Discourse

“…Increasingly empirical work is developing evidence in support of this view ( Lewis and Freedle, 1973;Kogan and Wimberger, 1966). In this paper, first-language acquisition will be examined in the context of that dynamic encounter of parent and child.…”