Variations in Mothers' Answers to Children's Questions, as a Function of Social Class, Verbal Intelligence Test Scores and Sex

Abstract

Mothers of five year old children were asked to say how they would reply to two `Where from' and four `Why' questions supposedly posed by their children. Answers were classified in terms of the amount, accuracy, context and type of information made available. Subjects were grouped by sex, verbal IQ, social class and an index of mother-child interaction. Although IQ and sex had some relevance to the variety of answers, social class was the major differentiating variable. Relative to the working class, the middle class mothers were more likely to answer the questions, the information given was more accurate and there was more of it; the information was embedded in a less `noisy' linguistic context and when the modes of answers to the `Why' questions were categorized, the middle class mothers were found more likely to use compound arguments, analogies, to give a greater variety of purposive answers, and were less likely to repeat the question as an answer. These differences are consistent with Bernstein's distinction between `elaborated' and `restricted' codes and with an operationalization of this applied to the linguistic form and content of answers to questions.