Consistency In Children Research Articles

Continuity and Change: A Reply

Continuity and Change: A Reply

Viewing imitation as child responsiveness: a link between teaching and discipline domains of socialization.

The authors observed 106 children's imitation and responses to maternal control at 14 and 22 months. Imitation was observed in a teaching task in which mothers modeled 3 standard pretend-play sequences. Responses to control were observed in typical discipline contexts. Girls imitated more than boys. Responsive imitation measures were coherent and longitudinally stable and correlated significantly with responsiveness to maternal control. The authors propose that a young child's willingness to imitate his or her parent in a teaching context and to comply in a control context both reflect a responsive or receptive stance toward parental socialization. The consistency of children's responsiveness across contexts has implications for both sociomoral and cognitive development.

Genotypes of Mutans Streptococci Tend to Persist in Their Host for Several Years

The aim of this study was to evaluate the consistency of the prevalence of mutans streptococci in a group of Swedish families. Eleven families, which had previously been examined for genotypes of mutans streptococci, were re–examined after 2–5 years. The families consisted of mother, father and a child (mean age 7.2 years at the follow–up examination). One father did not participate. Pooled plaque samples were obtained from buccal and occlusal surfaces. Isolates of mutans streptococci were genotyped using chromosomal DNA digested with restriction endonuclease HaeIII, separated by gel electrophoresis and visualised through UV illumination after ethidium bromid staining. Comparing the DNA fingerprints of mutans streptococci found at baseline and follow–up, 9 children harboured one or two genotypes which were similar on the two sampling occasions. Two of these children had also gained a genotype. The remaining 2 children had lost a genotype each and 1 of them had gained two new genotyes. All 21 adults showed one or two genotypes identical to those found at baseline. Nine of these 21 adults had also lost one genotype. Four of these 9 and additionally 4 of the remaining adults showed one or two new genotypes. Six mother–child pairs shared a genotype at baseline and this pattern remained for five pairs at the end of the study. The results suggest that genotypes of mutans streptococci have a fairly high degree of consistency in children between 3 and 8 years of age as well as in adults, indicating persistence of the strains. However, the results also indicate that some subjects may gain and/or lose genotypes.

Focus on qualitative methods: Interviewing children

The focus in health-related research on children has shifted from seeking information about children to seeking information directly from them. Children, even as young as three years old, can give graphic descriptions and have excellent recall of experiences related to adverse events, such as illness and hospitalization. Children use scripts as the primary means of anticipating, comprehending, and re-creating real-life experience. The content, timing, number, and structure of interviews will influence the completeness, accuracy, and consistency of children's recall of events. Although at times conflicting, the findings from recent scholarship on children's narrative competence will assist researchers to select the interviewing strategies most likely to yield faithful representations of experience. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Res Nurs Health 22:177–185, 1999

Interviewing children.

The focus in health-related research on children has shifted from seeking information about children to seeking information directly from them. Children, even as young as three years old, can give graphic descriptions and have excellent recall of experiences related to adverse events, such as illness and hospitalization. Children use scripts as the primary means of anticipating, comprehending, and re-creating real-life experience. The content, timing, number, and structure of interviews will influence the completeness, accuracy, and consistency of children's recall of events. Although at times conflicting, the findings from recent scholarship on children's narrative competence will assist researchers to select the interviewing strategies most likely to yield faithful representations of experience.

Consistency of Children's Sexualized or Avoidant Reactions to Anatomical Dolls: A Pilot Study

ABSTRACT Anatomical dolls are a common but controversial tool in the assessment of suspected child sexual abuse. The present pilot study was conducted to explore the consistency of behaviors of 10 young children who had demonstrated clear intercourse positionings with anatomical dolls (Demonstrators) and 10 children who had avoided any contact with the unclothed dolls (Avoiders) during a prior normative study. These children, along with matched controls from the original sample, were re-interviewed 16 months later to determine whether their interactions with the dolls changed over time. Items of interest included the frequency of the childrens' sexualized and avoidant behaviors with the dolls as well as their knowledge of the mechanics of intercourse and possible sources of such knowledge. Findings revealed that changes over time occurred in all groups. Changes in the children's behaviors may be explained by cultural, maturational and socialization factors. Implications for interviewing young children are...

The effect of parent versus unfamiliar interviewers on children's eyewitness memory and identification accuracy.

This research was designed to learn if children's relationships with interviewers might influence the accuracy of their eyewitness memory and their ability to make identifications from lineups. In two experiments, kindergarten children (5-year-olds) viewed a slide show depicting a minor theft. Children were then interviewed by either their own parent or an unfamiliar experimenter with either a target present or target absent simultaneous photographic lineup. When lineups were presented by parents, children were less accurate, changed their identifications more frequently, and were more likely to acquiesce with a suggestion about an alternative identification. Children showed poorer recall of the event when interviewed by their parent in an unstructured interview (Experiment 1); however, no differences were observed when parents and experimenters followed the same script (Experiment 2). Overall, the results indicate that interviewers can influence the accuracy and consistency of children's eyewitness identifications.

Interviewing Young Children about Body Touch and Handling

Children aged 3-6 years were interviewed following a scheduled pediatric clinic visit to assess the efficacy of two independent variables--interview strategy and number of interviews--on the accuracy, completeness, and consistency of children's reports. Four experimental interviews were created--a verbal interview and three interviews enhanced with anatomically detailed cues (dolls, line drawings, and computer graphics), photographs, and props. Initially, 130 children were interviewed after the clinic event. One month later, 124 were interviewed again, and 74 were interviewed a third time after 6 months. Children's reports were compared to videotapes and medical records of their pediatric visit in order to create three dependent reporting variables--accuracy, completeness, and consistency. In addition, the predictive power of four sets of covariates on reporting was assessed: (1) age and gender, (2) ethnicity, medical history, family stress, and mother's education; (3) number of invasive medical procedures, number of body touches, health status, and child's pain judgments; and (4) number of outpatient and inpatient visits between the initial and the follow-up interviews at 1 and 6 months. Initially, children's spontaneous reports of body touch were highly accurate, but sparse. After a 1-month delay, accuracy and completeness dropped significantly: accuracy was stable from 1 to 6 months; completeness rebounded at 6 months. Three-year-olds' reports of body touch were less complete and less consistent, but rarely less accurate, than those of older age groups. After 1- and 6-month delays, consistently reported information was more accurate than new information. Children's pain ratings contributed positively to predictions of completeness at the initial and 1-month interviews and to completeness and accuracy at 6 months. Complex events were reported more accurately but less consistently. Anatomically detailed cues in the three enhanced interviews increased completeness of reporting of total body and genital touch. Photos elicited more useful information for identification of persons and places than did questions, while medical props initially offered no advantage and subsequently led to errors. Children's feelings also influenced reporting: higher ratings of anger, sadness, and fright were positively related to reporting of extremely painful touch, while some children who failed to report painful, invasive medical procedures displayed shame when interviewed. The relative privacy of the computer-assisted interview holds promise for disclosure of sexual topics.

Task-related variation in communication of mothers and their sons with learning disability

The purpose of the present study was to examine whether mother-child communication patterns vary as a function of the type of the task. Groups of learning disabled (LD=30) and normally achieving boys (NLD=30) were videotaped interacting with their mothers in two different tasks. The children were matched for age (8 to 11 year-olds) and for parent’s SES. The results indicated that the teaching task differentiated the groups more than did the story task. Academic character of the teaching task increased mothers’ task involvement in both groups. Mothers of the LD group showed, however, significantly more dominance and expressed less emotionality while teaching their child. Mothers’ interaction partly followed from their children’s behaviour on this task. The children with LD did not cooperate with their mothers and were not emotionally involved in the teaching task as highly as were the normally achieving children. Corresponding features of interaction were not found for the LD group in the story task. Consistency of children’s communication across the tasks was significant in the LD group. The normally achieving boys were more responsive to changes in task conditions showing different behavior as a function of task.

Consistency of children's use of science conceptions: Problems with the notion of “conceptual change”

A study of primary school children's explanations of a range of phenomena concerning air pressure revealed considerable fluidity in their use of conceptions. A measure of consistency was developed and applied to children's written and oral explanations in a range of contexts. While the results showed a general trend with age toward more abstract, ‘generalizable’ conceptions, the notion of parsimony was found to be problematic on a number of levels. Children do not apply a single conception to a phenomenon, but rather operate with multiple conceptions in their explanations, complicating the whole notion of consistency. Moreover, as they develop and apply more advanced conceptions, children inevitably display temporary reductions in consistency. These findings suggest a rather more complex model of conceptual advance than implied in the literature on ‘conceptual change’.

Consistency of children's hemodynamic responses to laboratory stressors

Hemodynamic responses to three standard laboratory stressors (i.e., postural change, video game, forehead cold) were evaluated in 341 children (170 males) who had a mean age of 11.2 ± 2.6 years. Inter-task consistency was evaluated for five physiological parameters for all stressor pairings. Evidence of consistency in systolic and diastolic blood pressure, heart rate, cardiac output, and total peripheral resistance responses to all three stressors was observed. The highest and most consistent correlations across stressors were observed for cardiac output and total peripheral resistance responses. The need for clarification in the categorization of laboratory stressors used to measure reactivity is discussed.

Maori word‐processing for indigenous New Zealand young children

AbstractWe argue that there is an important and as yet unmet need for software that allows each cultural group to express the written word in an indigenous character set. As an example, we present a word‐processing system, Ta Kupu, designed for use in teaching the Maori language to children. The program simplifies the input task by taking advantage of the structural features of the Maori language. The system also includes a data logging, evaluation, and analysis tool, Tirohia, that permits teachers to evaluate a child's familiarity with the word‐processor. The main features of the evaluation software include: the ability to replay a record of a child's interaction in real time; facilities for summarising a child's consistency of use and level of performance; and the capability of examining interaction log files at a fine‐grained level. We also address the application of these data logging and evaluation techniques to the areas of human factors research, interface design and interface evaluation.

Parent-teacher agreement on kindergarteners' behavior problems: a research note.

The present study investigated parameters of agreement as well of disagreement among mothers' and teachers' ratings of the behavior of kindergarten boys and girls. Findings indicated a generally low to moderate level of agreement between these two types of informants. They also suggested that demographic and background characteristics can effect size and direction of level of agreement. Although proportions of children rated as having the listed behavior problems varied in magnitude according to mothers and teachers, the rank order of the proportion of children with those behavior problems was rather similar for both informants. Such similar rankings of prevalence rates may reflect parents' and teachers' agreement on the consistency of children's behavior across the home and school settings.

Content and consistency in young children's autobiographical recall

Even very young children are capable of recalling past events. Previous research has indicated that children are learning the appropriate forms for talking about the past in conversations with adults. However, exactly what young children remember and how consistent their recall is from time to time is less clear. We investigated these questions by comparing the content of 30‐ to 35‐month‐old children's memories for events experienced during two separate interviews with their mother, two interviews with a stranger, or one interview with their mother and one with a stranger. Two major findings emerged. First, children recalled more accurate information when conversing with the stranger than with their mother. Second, although we found more consistency in children's recall when conversing with the same adult across the two interviews than when conversing with a different adult, children's recall was highly inconsistent overall. Children overwhelmingly remembered different, but still accurate information on t...

The Consistency of Young Children??s Assessment of Remembered Painful Events

Clinicians need to know the consistency of a child's report of his pain in order to assess the intensity of that pain. To explore an age cutoff above which children are consistent in reporting their pain, we tested the consistency of children's reports of recalled pain, using a variety of scales. We interviewed 91 children, three to eight years of age, and obtained each child's report of two of his own painful experiences. In two separate sessions, we asked each child to compare those specific experiences in several ways, using two picture scales, a block-based scale, triads, and the simple question, "which hurt you more?" Results show that children older than seven years are more consistent in reporting the relative pain intensity of remembered events than younger ones (range 50-100% vs. 20-55%, p less than 0.001), and that the simple question provides the most consistent answer. However, no age group tested was consistent more than 80% of the time on all measures. We conclude that children are able to report remembered pain intensity consistently with increasing age but that we cannot establish a firm cutoff between the ages of three and eight years with our data.

Understanding of the Dimensional Terms 'Easy' and 'Hard' in the Self-Evaluation of Competence

Young children's understanding of the verbal terms 'easy' and 'hard' in describing personal competence at depicted activities was investigated with reference to a developmental sequence suggested by Heckhausen (1982) to describe the child's understanding of concepts concerning personal achievement. The consistency of children's judgments rather than their realism or accuracy was the criterion used for investigating each of two developmental levels of understanding. For the 3-and 4-year-old children in studies 1 and 2, there was consistency between responses to the terms 'can'/'can't' and the terms 'easy'/'hard'. At the higher developmental level, in study 3, both 5-and 7-year-olds were able to make consistent unidimensional orderings of the level of difficulty of activities.

Parental Socialization of Young Children's Play: A Short-Term Longitudinal Study

EISENBERG, NANCY; WOLCHIK, SHARLENE A; HERNANDEZ, ROBERT; and PASTERNACK, JEANNETTE F. Parental Socialization of Young Children's Play: A Short-Term Longitudinal Study. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1985, 56, 1506-1513. In the present study, mothers' and fathers' socialization of 1-2-yearolds' sex-typed play behaviors was examined. For each parent, dyadic interactions were videotaped in the home on 2 occasions that were separated by about 6 months. Mothers and fathers did not differentially reinforce boys and girls for masculine or neutral play (feminine toys frequently were absent from the play sessions). However, sex of child did affect parents' choice of toys to use during the interactions. Parents of boys chose more neutral and masculine toys than feminine toys; parents of girls chose more neutral toys than masculine or feminine toys. Regardless of toy type, parental reinforcement decreased from Session 1 to Session 2. Parental toy choice but not parental positive reinforcement was related to children's play choices. Boys' play was more sex stereotypic than was that of girls, and both boys and girls played with more toys during mother-child sessions than fatherchild sessions. There was considerable consistency in children's choices of activities over time and in parental reinforcement for neutral toy play. Parental, especially maternal, differential reinforcement of sex-typed play was positively related to level of gender constancy at 2 to 2-6 years of age. These results are discussed in terms of their implications for the social learning account of sex-role development.

The classification of children's knowledge: Development on the balance-scale and inclined-plane tasks

R. S. Siegler (1981, Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 46 C2, Serial No. 189) has shown that performance on several Piagetian tasks is governed by similar rule structures. The purpose of the first study was to extend his analysis to the inclined-plane task, replicate his original observations about development on the balance-scale task, and determine the consistency in children's rule usage across tasks. We found that Siegler's (1981) binary decision representations adequately characterized development on these tasks, and there was fair correspondence of rule classifications across tasks. An alternative classification procedure, used to diagnose the rules of children who failed our original classification criteria, showed that most of these children's performance patterns were very similar to Siegler's rule patterns. In the second experiment, we improved the diagnosticity of our rule-assessment protocol in light of F. Wilkening and N. H. Anderson's (1982, Psychological Bulletin, 92, 215–237) criticisms, and observed that many Rule III children's predictions were associated with those of integration rules on both tasks. Despite these methodological improvements, many children, especially 5- to 7-year-olds, evidenced use of centration and lexicographic strategies, suggesting that these classifications are not simply an artifact of problem sampling. Some of the problems associated with the classification of children's knowledge are discussed.

Social Psychological Aspects of Competition for Male Youth Sport Participants: I. Predictors of Competitive Stress

This field study investigated the influence and stability of individual difference and situational factors on the competitive stress experienced by 9- to 14-year-old wrestlers. Stress was assessed by the children's form of the Competitive State Anxiety Inventory and was measured immediately before and after each of two consecutive tournament matches. Wrestlers' dispositions, characteristic precompetition cognitions, perceptions of significant adult influences, psychological states, self-perceptions, and competitive outcomes were examined as predictors of pre- and postmatch anxiety in separate multiple regression analyses for each tournament round. The most influential and stable predictors of prematch stress for both matches were competitive trait anxiety and personal performance expectancies, while win-loss and fun experienced during the match predicted postmatch stress for both rounds. In addition, prematch worries about failure and perceived parental pressure to participate were predictive of round 1 prematch stress. Round 1 postmatch stress levels predicted stress after round 2, suggesting some consistency in children's stress responses. In total, 61 and 35% of prematch and 41 and 32% of postmatch state anxiety variance was explained for rounds 1 and 2, respectively.

Attitude-Behavior Consistency in Children's Responses to Television Advertising

Attitude-Behavior Consistency in Children's Responses to Television Advertising