DOCUMENT RESUME ED 041 996 24 UD 010 514 AUTHOR Baldwin, Alfred L.; And Others TITLE Cognitive Content for Mother-Child Interactions. Final Report. INSTITUTION Cornell Univ., Ithaca, N.Y, Center for Research on Education. SPONS AGENCY Office of Education (DHEW), Washington, DrCr Bureau of Research. BUREAU NO BR-6-1341 PUB DATE May 70 GRANT OEG-0-9-610326-4480 NOTE 281p. EDRS PRICE EDRS Price MF-$1.25 HC-$4.15 DESCRIPTORS Behavior Patterns, Childhood Attitudes, Cognitive Development, Cognitive Measurement, *Cognitive Processes, Individual Differences, *Interaction Process Analysis, *Interpersonal Relationship, Lower Class, Middle Class, Mother Attitudes, Nonverbal Communication, *Parent Child Relationship, Research Methodology, *Socialization, Stereotypes, Upper Class ABSTRACT This study details three methods developed during the course of an investigation for describing adult-child interaction:(1) the "VINEX" category system for coding the actual language of the adult and the child; (2) a coding system for describing nonverbal behavior; and,(3) Interaction Language," for the use of an observer in narrating the adult-child interaction, The test materials were small samples of mother-child pairs from New York City- -one from West Harlem (with a middle and lower class subsample), and the other from Washington Square (white upper middle class). The empirical findings of the study were as follows:(1) the general pattern of mother-child interaction was a responsive one - -pa give and take interaction which was not balanced, but at the same time not markedly one-sided;(2) changes in interaction with age appeared to be partly due to the child's cognitive development, increase of explanations, and increased grammatical complexity for example; (3) the differences between the West Harlem and the Washington Square samples, as well as the difference between the lower and middle class West Harlem sample appeared to be small; and,(4) commonly held stereotypes of the family interaction of Harlem children were not supported by any of the data of the study. Appended are manuals on the methodology developed, extensive tabul,tions of test results, and interview formats used. (RJ) Final Report Project No. 6-1341 Grant No. OEG 09-610326-4480 COGNITIVE CONTENT OF MOTHER-CHILD INTERACTIONS Alfred L. Baldwin Clara P. Baldwin '44 with Milton Seegmiller Boyce Ford Sheldon Frank, M.D. Paul Ward Cornell University Ithaca, New York 14850 May 1970 The research reported herein was performed pursuant'toa grant with the Office of Education, U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Contractors undertaking such projects under Government sponsorship are encouragcd to eXpress freely their professional judgment in the conduct of the project. Points of view or opinions stated do not, therefore, necessarily represent official Office of Education position or policy. U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH, EDUCATION I WELFARE OFFICE OF EDUCATION THIS DOCUMENT HAS SEEN REPRODUCED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED FROM THE PERSON OR ORGANIZATION ORIGINATING IT, POINTS OF VIEW OR OPINIONS STATED DO NOT NECES- SARILY REPRESENT OFFICIAL OFFICE OF EDU- CATION POSITION OR POLICY. PREFACE This is the final report of a research project which began in 1966. It has been funded under a Project Literacy grant from the Office of Education. Our major objective throughout the research has been to develop reliable measures for studying the ways in which children acquire cognitive functions in naturalistic situations, and to utilize these measures to study this socialization process in the interactions of a variety of children and significant socialization agents. At the time when the study began, there were many statements in the literature regarding the influence of mother-child interactions on the cognitive development of particularly our poor children in urban ghettoes. Yet there was little empirical data to support those assumptions. Our data collection has focussed on the study of a number of the interactions of boys and their mothers from West Harlem. The sample includes both middle and lower class Negro boys who were born in four hospitals in that area. We also have a sample of mothers and boys from the area bordering Washington Square in New York.Most of these families are middle-class and academic. Because the work has been carried on over several years, during which time our major research unit was moved from New York University to Cornell University, there are a number of people in both New York and Ithaca whose loyal efforts have been crucial to the successful completion of the project. This research has produced a massive logistics problem, thousands of utterances and an equal number of observers' sentences to record, transcribe, code, and analyze. There were times when the task seemed impossible. It has also had many moments of excitement, satisfaction, and the authors will be always grateful to their staff. Bonni Seegmiller was with us throughout the entire project, first as a graduate assistant and then as a research associate. She has helped with the development of the measures, supervised the large data collection in Harlem in 1968-69, and has done a great deal of coding and data analysis. Dr. Sheldon Frank has served as our linguistic consultant through- out the project, and he has supervised the training of coders and the analysis of the children's and mother's language utilizing the measure of syntactic complexity developed by Frank and Osser (1970). He has also been invaluable in our discussions of children's language develop- ment. Milton Seegmiller has been in charge of the data collection during the fall of 1969, and has been particularly involved in the complexity analysis of the children's and mother's language. Shirley Cohen, a graduate student in Psychology at New York University, did all of the initial development of the VINEX coding system, working for nearly a year from transcripts of half-hour interactions of a group of 4 four yearold children and their teacher in two standard play situations. Since our return to Cornell, Boyce Ford has been our research associate, and has contributed innumerable hours to the computer analysis of some 130,000 utterances. He has persistently fought and won a number of battles with the computer,and this report could never have been completed without his dedicated supervision of this part of the project. Paul Ward, a fellow at the Center for Research in Education at Cornell, has contributed his creative knowledge of computer programming to the project, and it is primarily due to his assistance that we are well on the way to developing a program for analyzing the interactional language in such a way that we feel it will constitute an important break-through in the analysis of narrative records of naturalistic situations. This kind of research has many details which must be attended to with care and accuracy. Accurate transcripts are the basis of the language analysis, and it is no easy job to find people who will do this work well. We have been fortunate in having a series of transcribers and typists who were not only skilled at their tasks, but dedicated enough to the research and the data to be interested in it as well as efficient. Kathy Woznicki, Elayne Barun, Mary Odum, Claire Browne, Shirley Nancy were five of these. We've also had a series of research assistants and associates both at New York University and Cornell who have conscientiously and patiently carried out parts of data collection, the coding and analysis. Often it has been hard for them to see the total picture for the forest of detail of their particular task, but they have all effectively carried out the jobs that needed to be done and in addition have contributed much to the research in the way of new ideas and clarification of old ones. Some of the assistants have been full-time, some graduare assistants and some Antioch corop students. Working with us in New York were: Jared Keil, Ann Singer, Susan Feldman, Jan Drucker, George Green, Sudan Blumenthal; at Cornell - Jane Hamacher, Bob Delestrsda, Hari Peterson, Sharon Horner, Jean Simmons, Barbara Nelson, Jean Grossman have been our research associate and assistants. Last, and most importantly, we would like to thank the parents and children who have helped us to learn more about mother-child interactions' We had approached research in New York with some trepidation, but have found the mothers and children a most delightful group of people to know. They have been interested in the research, reliable in meeting appointments, and cooperative with us. For some this has meant long trips from Harlem to New York University, and for 11 mothers it ham meant staying with us it for three years of research.Sincere thanks of the authors go to these people who have literally made the research possible. ii There is little doubt thatmuch of the cooperation which we received from some of the Harlemmothers was due to their association with Dr. Frank Palmer andhis research group at the HarlemTraining Center. This group hasprovided us with space to conductthe research with and invaluable assistance inobtaining subjects and providing us data from their own research. Finally, our thanks go to ourhighly skillful and patient secretary, Mrs. VioletShepardson, who has typed, re-typed,edited and assembled this report. Alfred L. Baldwin Clara P. Baldwin iii Table of Contents Page Chapter 1 - Introduction and Background of the Study 1 Chapter 2 - Methodology Section Title I Sample 8 Ib Recruitment of Subjects 9 III Experimental Situation