Cross-Cultural Research on Children’s Development: Deep Roots and New Branches

Abstract

John and Beatrice Whiting took on the ethnocentric assumptions of the fields of child development and child psychiatry and crafted a research agenda that laid the groundwork for half a decade of scholarship. They made culture visible through their study of behavior and relationships, as illustrated in decades of systematic and ethnographic observations of individual children in context. Their research initiatives served to critique and enhance social science discourse, and they routinely engaged others in debating the processes and meanings of their research. Although a bulk of their work has since been incorporated into scholarship on the cultural nature of child development, their theoretical and methodological orientation to the social and environmental bases of children’s learning and development has influenced research in other fields as well. This article examines contributions of the Whitings to theory, research, and, increasingly, policy and practices in the applied fields of early care and early childhood education, including the utilization of ethnography to improve minority and multicultural education. Examples of contemporary theory and culturally grounded research are presented as new branches of scholarship that extend far beyond what they might have foreseen, yet with deep roots tracing back to the work of John and Bea Whiting.