Culture Structures the Environment for Development

Abstract

Culture is usefully conceived for developmentalists as the organization of the developmental environment. This definition makes available to scientific scrutiny the processes by which culture affects the course of development, that is, how it generates the relationships and meanings of variables that are more familiar, individually, to traditional developmental scientists. One framework for parsing the environment is the ''developmental niche'', which identifies three operational subsystems – the physical and social settings, the historically constituted customs and practices of child care and child rearing, and the psychology of the caretakers, particularly parental ethnotheories which play a directive role and are, by definition, shared with the community. Three organizational aspects of the niche create particularly important developmental outcomes: contemporary redundancy, which is the mutually reinforcing repetition of similar influences from several parts of the environment during the same period of development; thematic elaboration, which is the repetition and cultivation over time of core symbols and systems of meaning; and chaining, in which no single element of the environment is sufficient in kind to produce a particular outcome, but the linking of disparate elements creates a qualitatively new phenomenon. In addition, there is a more complex set of second-order effects; sex and temperament, for example, are characteristics whose meaning and consequence are organized by features of the environment. Finally, it is argued that theoretical recognition of variable relationships between development and the environment represents our discipline''s growth toward abstract thinking.

Identity Agents: Parents as Active and Reflective Participants in Their Children's Identity Formation

“…Different cultural contexts produce diverse courses of development, guided by diverse culturally valued goals (Rogoff, 2003). Super and Harkness (2002) discussed the importance of parents and the larger culture in constructing the developmental niche-the constructed environment in which children develop. They pointed out how cultural belief systems inform parenting practices that organize the daily regularities of children's lives.…”

“You should give a child love and take them warm-heartedly from their parent”: Preschool teachers’ practice and understanding of care

“…The interpretation of care and its enactment is at the centre of this paper. Super and Harkness (2002) use the concept of a "developmental niche" to explain infant development as structurally patterned. They describe care as "based on cultural beliefs and practices of caregivers".…”

Reviews: Child Development, Culture and Psychological Development, Discovering Statistics Using SPSS (3rd ed.), Doing Qualitative Research in Psychology: A Practical Guide, Essential Psychology: A Concise Introduction, Movies and Mental Illness: Using Films to Understand Psychopathology (3rd ed.), Psychological Groupwork with Acute Psychiatric Patients, Psychology: The Science of Mind and Behaviour, Theories of Developmental Psychology, Your Psychology Project Handbook: Becoming a Researcher, Loftus Speaks

“…In this chapter several models are discussed that seek to explain the impact of 'cultural factors' on human development; in particular the focus is on the ecological model of Bronfenbrenner (1979), the ecological niche of Super and Harkness (2002), the dualism of the cultural context model of Cole (1999), and the ecological-transactional model of Sameroff and Chandler (1975) and Sameroff (1987). A brief analysis of the qualitative and quantitative methods used in the study of the impact of culture on child development concludes Chapter 2.…”