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child development in
context
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Michael E. Lamb, PhD, Head, Section on Social
and Emotional Development Yael Orbach, PhD, Staff
Scientist Margaret-Ellen Pipe, PhD, Staff
Scientist Craig Abbott, PhD, Statistician Ann-Christin Cederborg, PhD, Visiting
Researchera Hillary N. Fouts, PhD,
Postdoctoral Fellow Eva V. Guterman, PhD, Postdoctoral
Fellow David La Rooy, PhD, Postdoctoral
Fellow Veronica Chavez, BA, Predoctoral
Fellow Renee DeBoard, BA, Predoctoral
Fellow Katie Hrapczynski, BS,
Predoctoral Fellow Sarah Jensen, BA, Predoctoral
Fellow Monique Mendoza, BA, Predoctoral
Fellow Casey Sullivan, BA, Predoctoral Fellow |
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Our research is designed to
explore how developmental processes are influenced by their social and
physical context. To elucidate these influences and processes, researchers
must examine the interface between endogenous and exogenous processes,
children’s conceptions and perceptions of their experiences, and the
ways in which knowledge of developmental processes can inform social policies
and practices. Children’s
accounts of experienced events Lamb, Abbott,
Cederborg, Guterman, Orbach, Pipe; in collaboration with Aldridge, Brown,
Esplin, Friedman, Hershkowitz, Horowitz, Lewis, Lyon, Thierry, Warren One major program of research
involves the development and assessment of techniques for enhancing the
informativeness of child witnesses and for evaluating the credibility of
their accounts. Several studies in our research program focus on the
relationship between interviewer style and the quality of information
provided by young children. The work has confirmed that open-ended prompts of
recall memory are likely to elicit longer, more detailed, and more accurate
responses than focused questions in both analog and forensic contexts. Our
findings have strengthened the generalizability to the forensic context of
the results obtained in many laboratory studies. In
research conducted in collaboration with investigative agencies in the Adaptations of the NICHD
Investigative Interview Protocol for use with young witnesses and alleged
perpetrators are currently used in the field. Our research has shown that
young witnesses recall as much information in total, as well as in response
to open-ended prompts, as do alleged victims. Alleged suspects tend to be
more reluctant, but those who agree to talk provide as much information about
their experiences and are as responsive to free-recall prompts as age mates
who are alleged victims. Comparisons of victims’ and offenders’
accounts of the same incidents of abuse are currently under way. Another
field experiment has shown that the introduction of gender-neutral anatomical
drawings in the context of protocol-guided interviews also helps children
provide substantial numbers of additional details about alleged incidents of
abuse. The gender-neutral drawings were especially productive when shown to
young (four- to seven-year-old) children. Given that we do not know whether
the reported information is accurate, we have initiated research, in
collaboration with In other ongoing field
research, we are exploring the effects of different types of
interviewers’ suggestive prompts and of repeated interviews on
children’s responses as well as the extent to which use of the protocol
facilitates decisions and interventions designed to prosecute offenders and
protect children. Given, however, that many children do not disclose
suspected abuse when interviewed, we are also exploring case characteristics
and the dynamics of interviews both with children who do make allegations and
those who do not or make allegations only reluctantly. Our aim is to identify
the factors that lead children not to report abuse that they experienced. The
studies should also help us to develop procedures that can be implemented
nonsuggestively in forensic settings in order to enhance the sensitivity and
specificity of conclusions drawn from investigative interviews. A book is
currently in preparation based on the proceedings an the international
conference on delayed and nondisclosure of child sexual abuse, convened in
August 2003 by staff of this laboratory and collaborators. Aldridge
J, Lamb ME, Sternberg KJ, Orbach Y, Esplin PW, Bowler L. Using a human figure
drawing to elicit information from alleged victims of child sexual abuse. J Consulting Clin Psychol
2004;72:304-316. Lamb
ME, Sternberg KJ, Orbach Y, Esplin PW, Stewart H, Mitchell S. Age differences
in young children’s responses to open-ended invitations in the course
of forensic interviews. J Consulting
Clin Psychol 2003;71:926-934. Lamb
ME, Sternberg KJ, Orbach Y, Hershkowitz I, Horowitz D. Differences between
accounts provided by witnesses and alleged victims of child sexual abuse. Child Abuse Negl 2003;27:1019-1031. Pipe
M-E, Lamb ME, Orbach Y, Esplin PW. Recent research on children’s testimony
about experienced and witnessed events. Dev
Rev, in press. Thierry KL, Lamb ME, Orbach Y. Awareness of the origin of knowledge predicts child witnesses’ recall of alleged sexual and physical abuse. Appl Cognit Psychol 2004;17:953-967. Effects of domestic
violence Lamb, Abbott,
Guterman Another
program of research focuses on the effects of child and spouse abuse on the
development of children and adolescents and on factors that moderate or
mediate these effects. The program involves three lines of research: a
longitudinal study of domestic violence, a mega-analysis of a combined set of
data from 12 independent studies, and the development of the Child
Maltreatment Log (CML), a computerized data collection instrument. The
Israeli Longitudinal Domestic Violence Study uses a prospective longitudinal
design to investigate the early and later effects of being physically abused
and/or witnessing physical abuse between parents on children’s
adjustment at different developmental stages. Independent interviews with
mothers, fathers, and children revealed widely divergent accounts of the
families’ histories of violence, and the differences complicate efforts
to identify links between experiences and outcomes. In both middle childhood
and adolescence, however, family violence appears to affect the
offsprings’ views of their parents. Whereas physical abuse between
parents has little apparent effect on the children’s attachments to
their parents, children and adolescents feel less closely attached to the
parents who had abused them. Effects are greater on adolescents’
reports of attachment to their mothers than to their fathers, irrespective of
perpetrator. The relationship between concurrent behavior problems and form
of abuse varies by informant and study phase, although it is strongest when
based on children’s reports. Physically abused children report more
behavior problems and depression than nonabused children or those who witness
physical abuse between parents. Abuse in adolescence did not have as consistent
an effect on children’s behavior problems as did abuse in middle
childhood, with little evidence that early abuse had persistent effects in
the absence of continued abuse. Preliminary
results of the mega-analysis have shown that the odds of being at risk for
behavioral and emotional problems were consistently higher for children who
were abused witnesses than for children from nonviolent families.
Children’s age but not sex, however, moderates the effects of being a
victim or witness of abuse. We have completed a first stage of development,
pilot testing, and modification of the CML. Ongoing testing of the
CML’s function of generating database reports is currently under way.
In other ongoing research, we are investigating factors that protect children
and those that make children more susceptible to adverse effects of domestic
violence and examining the possible mediating effects of the frequency and
severity of family violence on children’s adjustment. Dawud-Noursi
S, Sternberg KJ, Lamb ME, Greenbaum C. Domestic violence: the reports of
multiple informants about children’s behavior problems. Hevra Virivaha [Hebrew], in
press. Sternberg
KJ, Knutson JF, Lamb ME, Baradaran LP, Nolan C, Flanzer S. The Child
Maltreatment Log: a computer-based program for describing research samples. Child Maltreat 2004;9:30-48. Sternberg
KJ, Lamb ME, Guterman E, Abbott C, Noursi SD. Adolescents’ perceptions
of attachment to their mothers and fathers in families with histories of
domestic violence. Child Abuse Negl, in
press. Adaptation to
nonparental child care Lamb, Abbott; in
collaboration with Ahnert, Chuang, Hwang One of our research programs
has involved short- and long-term longitudinal studies in Göteborg ( Longitudinal analyses revealed
substantial stability over time in the children’s personality styles.
Of the “big five” personality factors, conscientiousness was
coherent from toddlerhood, whereas the internal reliabilities of
extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, and openness to experience increased
over time. Scores on most of these factors were fairly stable over time, but
children became less extraverted, more agreeable, and more conscientious with
age. Although individual differences were stable, the children also became
more ego-controlled over time. Boys’ levels of ego resiliency were more
stable over time than girls’; boys became less resilient from middle
childhood into mid-adolescence, whereas girls became more ego-resilient as
they entered adolescence. Participants in the study were reinterviewed in
2003–2004, when they averaged 21 years of age. In
the Ahnert L, Gunnar MR, Lamb ME,
Barthel M. Transition to child care: associations with infant-mother
attachment, infant negative emotion and cortisol elevations. Child Dev 2004;75:639-650. Ahnert L, Lamb ME. Child care
and its impact on young children (2-5). In: Encyclopedia on Early Childhood Development. Centre of Excellence
for Early Childhood Development Web site, [online]
http://www.excellence-earlychildhood.ca/, 2004. Ahnert L, Lamb ME. Shared
care: establishing a balance between home and child care settings. Child Dev 2003;74:1044-1049. Lamb ME. Day care: measuring
quality of care. In: Fisher CB, Lerner RM, eds. Applied Developmental Science: an Encyclopedia of Research,
Policies, and Programs. Lamb ME, Ahnert L. Institutionelle
Betreuungskontexte und ihre entwicklungspsychologische Relevanz für
Kleinkinder [Institutional care contexts and their developmental relevance to
young children]. In: Keller H, ed. Handbuch
der Kleinkindforschung, third edition. Subcultural variations
in the nature of children’s early experiences Lamb, Fouts; in
collaboration with Ahnert, Hewlett, Roopnarine Another
project has focused on the description of cultural differences in early interaction.
In each case, we conducted extended observations to ensure the reliable
measurement of individual differences. We are conducting comparable day-long
observations of parents and infants in Extended
observations of two- to five-year-old Bofi infants whose families either
lived in villages or pursued a nomadic hunting and gathering lifestyle
revealed that, contrary to widespread beliefs, weaning was seldom a time of
parent-offspring conflict. In both groups, children initiated weaning as they
began to eat a variety of foodstuffs, although villagers were more likely to
terminate breastfeeding at a predetermined time, whereas foragers let the
children set the pace. Weaning was usually associated with pregnancy, and the
children’s reactions varied depending on maternal sensitivity and the
availability of additional care providers. Fouts HN. Central African
families: a comparison of Bofi farmer and forager families. In: Roopnarine
JL, Gielen UP, eds. Families in Global
Perspective. Fouts HN.
Social and emotional contexts of weaning among farmers and foragers. Ethnology 2004;43:65-81. Fouts HN. Social contexts of
weaning: the importance of cross-cultural studies. In: Gielen UP, Roopnarine
JL, eds. Childhood and Adolescence in
Cross-Cultural Perspective. Fouts HN, Lamb ME. Weanling
emotional patterns among the Bofi foragers of Fouts HN, Lamb ME, Hewlett
BS. Infant crying in hunter-gatherer cultures. Behav Brain Sci, in press. Subcultural variations in parental and filial perceptions and beliefs Lamb, Fouts; in collaboration
with Cabrera, Chuang, Hwang We
have been investigating ways in which variations among rearing environments
(especially as indexed by parental beliefs, values, and practices) affect
children’s development. In one line of research, we are longitudinally
assessing gender differences in the self-perceptions of two cohorts of
seventh- to 12th-graders so that we can explore the antecedents and
correlates of different styles of self-perception in adolescence. Rating
themselves in 11 different roles in a self-perception battery, girls
perceived themselves as more affiliative and less negatively affiliative in
many roles than boys, but gender differences in assertion were not reliable,
and girls’ assertiveness did not decline over time. The results contrast
with popular claims regarding girls’ “loss of voice” in
adolescence. Gender differences were context-specific and more pronounced in
ratings of Myself as a boy/girl and Myself with a close same-sex peer. To
explore antecedents of these gender differences further, a group of Swedish
15-year-olds whose development has been documented systematically since
infancy completed portions of the self-perception battery. Analyses of the
data are currently under way, but preliminary analyses suggest few reliable correlates
of individual differences in the sample. Day
RD, Lamb ME, eds. Conceptualizing and
Measuring Father Involvement. Lamb
ME. Developmentally appropriate parenting plans after divorce. In: Fisher CB,
Lerner RM, eds. Applied Developmental
Science: an Encyclopedia of Research, Policies, and Programs. Lamb
ME, ed. The Role of the Father in Child
Development (fourth edition). Lamb
ME, Chuang SS, Hwang CP. Internal reliability, temporal stability, and
correlates of individual differences in paternal involvement: a 15-year
longitudinal study in Lewis
C, Lamb ME. Fathers’ influences on children’s development: the
evidence from two-parent families. Eur
J Psychol Educ 2003;18:211-228. aLinköpings COLLABORATORS Lieselotte Ahnert,
PhD, Jan Aldridge, PhD,
Deirdre Brown,
PhD, Natasha Cabrera,
PhD, Susan S. Chuang,
PhD, Mireille Cyr, PhD,
Phillip W. Esplin,
EdD, Private Practice, William J.
Friedman, PhD, Irit Hershkowitz,
PhD, Barry S. Hewlett,
PhD, Dvora Horowitz,
PhD, Ministry of Labor and Social
Affairs, C. Philip Hwang,
PhD, John Knutson, PhD,
Charlie Lewis,
PhD, Thomas D. Lyon,
JD, PhD, Susanne Mitchell,
MSW, Salt Stephen W. Porges,
PhD, Kim P. Roberts,
PhD, Jaipaul L. Roopnarine,
PhD, Jacqueline
Shannon, PhD, The Heather L.
Stewart, MA, Salt Catherine
Tamis-Lemonda, PhD, The Karen L. Thierry,
PhD, Anne Graffam
Walker, PhD, Private Practice, Amye Warren, PhD, For further information, contact lambm@mail.nih.gov |
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