Interpretive approaches to culture: Understanding and investigating children’s psychological development

Abstract

While psychologists increasingly recognize the role of cultural processes in children’s psychological development, few analyze these cultural processes directly. This paper demonstrates how such cultural processes can be revealed by using interpretive approaches to culture and child development. Interpretive approaches maintain definitions of culture that are common in the literature more generally, highlighting that culture refers to both “substance” (i.e. beliefs, values, and practices that are shared, historical, and organized) and “communities” (i.e. groups of people). However, interpretive approaches use and treat this definition differently than do most developmental studies by emphasizing contextual understanding and description over linear and internal causation. Interpretive approaches therefore have implications for both the kind of knowledge researchers produce about culture and development, and for the kinds of ways in which researchers engage with cultural communities during the research process. In the paper, I outline the “substance” side and the “community” side of culture in turn, drawing on examples from my own work on parent-child conversations and moral development within U.S. evangelical and mainline Christian religious cultures in order to illustrate what an interpretive approach could look like. Through these examples, I highlight the active role of individuals in their development and in defining their cultural communities through practices of self-monitoring. The implications of interpretive approaches for applied developmental science include expanded scientific understanding of human psychological functioning and more generous and engaged intercultural relations.