Early Childhood Socialization Research Articles

Parental Behavior and Vocational Choice: A Comparison of Counselors and Engineers

This study compared the perceived parental behavior characteristics of 41 counselors in training and 33 fifth‐year engineering students in a test of a part of Roe's vocational choice theory, which suggests dichotomous pattern of vocational choice: “toward persons” (e.g., counseling) or “toward nonpersons” (e.g., engineering) categories that will have been determined by the nature of the early childhood socialization process. In essence, a person who has experienced a warm loving home situation is more likely to enter a “toward persons” occupation and an individual whose parent‐child relationship was emotionally cold will most likely gravitate toward a “toward nonpersons” occupation. Both groups were administered the Parent‐Child Relations Questionnaire developed by Roe and Siegelman. The findings lend considerable support to Roe's theory.

Political Socialization of Children in the USSR

For Marx and Engels, the traditional bourgeois childrearing family was doomed. Following the successful proletarian revolution, children would be housed, socialized, and educated by public organizations. In actual practice most Soviet leaders since the revolution have not regarded the family and early childhood as high priority items for governmental attention. And even those who have, found it difficult to make an impact. This resistance appears to be related to the extremely high cost of enlarging programs affecting the family and early childhood enough to have a definitive impact and to the difficulty of assessing the results. The current Soviet leadership has not appeared interested in these matters and has left policy, assessment, and control up to educational specialists who have become increasingly critical of the results of Soviet childrearing. One concrete result is that the present level of overt early childhood socialization is probably at its lowest point in Soviet history. The study of Soviet political socialization has traditionally re-

The Logic of Naturalistic Inquiry

A version of the research act, termed naturalistic behaviorism, is presented and compared to existing formulations of the method. A sensitizing framework for organizing naturalistic studies is presented. Special attention is given the problems of sampling, measurement, and causal analysis. Examples from an ongoing study of early childhood socialization are presented as tentative solutions to the sampling and analysis issues. Central weight is given to introspective-investigator accounts of social process. Existing formulations of naturalism as a distinct approach to empirical inquiry in the social sciences suffer from several overriding flaws. On the one hand, naturalistic theorists and practitioners have seldom been in agreement on what they mean by the method. For some (Catton, 1966), it is seen as rigorous positivism. For others (Matza, 1969), it is viewed as humanism in disguise. For still others (Barker, 1968; Hutt and Hutt, 1970; Willems and Rausch, 1969; Wright, 1967), it is compared to ecological psychology and/or ethology-a bare kind of behaviorism that studies people in their natural habitats. Here the naturalist, like the ethologist, makes little effort to record, probe, and study such socialpsychological processes as attitudes and definitions of the situation. There are those (Lofland, 1971) who view naturalism as a deep commitment to collect rich, often atheoretical ethnographic specimens of human behavior. These statements also suffer from a failure to specify the empirical phenomena to which the method is directed (e.g., if one observes behavior, what kinds of behavior?). Nor has there been any systematic attention given such traditional and perduring methodological problems as measurement, sampling, validity, reliability, and causal analysis. The basic unit of naturalistic analysis has never been clarified and the role of the naturalistic observer in his studies remains clouded. This conceptual diversity has led many to take a sceptical, if not irreverent, view of the naturalistic approach, viewing it as soft science or journalism. Perhaps the basic deficiency of prior naturalistic formulations has been the absence of a more general theoretical perspective that would integrate all phases of the sociological act. With few exceptions the dominant scientific paradigm has been imported from physics, chemistry, or biology.' In this article I offer a view of naturalism that takes as its point of departure the social behaviorism of Mead (1934; 1938) and the symbolic interactionism of Blumer (1969). I call this version of the research act naturalistic behaviorism and mean by the term the studied commitment to actively enter the worlds of native people and to render those worlds understandable from the standpoint of a theory that is grounded in the behaviors, languages, definitions, attitudes, and feelings of those studied. Naturalistic behaviorism attempts a wedding of the covert, private features of the social act with its public, behaviorally observable counterparts. It thus works back and forth between word and deed, definition and act. Naturalistic behaviorism aims for viable social theory, it takes rich ethnographic descriptions only as a point of departure. This version of behaviorism recognizes that humans have social selves and as such act in ways that reflect their unfolding definitions of the situation. The naturalist is thus obliged to enter people's minds, if only through retrospective accounts I am grateful to Philip Bechtel, Herbert Blumer, H. M. Blalock, Donald Dixon, John Lofland, Peter Manning, Anselm Strauss, and Clark McPhail for their comments and criticisms on earlier versions of this article. l The major exceptions here are Becker (1970a), Lofland (1971), and Schatzman and Strauss (in press).

Educability and Rehabilitation: The Future of the Welfare Class

Socialization in early childhood of behavior leading to socio-economic and educational poverty was examined in mother-child interactions in problem-solving situations. The teaching styles, interactional modes, and attitudes toward school of Negro lower-status and ADC mothers appear to restrict the child's educability to such an extent that many lower-status children enter the first grade unable to assimilate information presented in a classroom setting. Present policies supposedly designed to ameliorate this self-perpetuating threaten to institutionalize it, thus progressively creating a permanent welfare class. To eventually eliminate the cultural deprivation which now characterizes a large segment of our society, measures attacking its cause, not its symptoms, must be instituted.

Toward a theory of schizophrenia. External objects and the creation of meaning.

Nonbiological approaches to the problem of schizophrenia are as numerous as the problem is complex. The many lines of thinking, and the lack of coordination between them, reflect this baffling complexity. To cite only a few of the extremes in these lines of approach, we have, on the one hand, Devereux's early, highly simplified sociological view, which focusses on the difficulty of orientation to an external world. This difficulty is thought to be due to something as objective and historical as the extreme complexity of modern living.⁹On the other hand, there is Szasz's recent hypothesis of a deficiency in internal objects,¹⁹a deficiency which results from inadequate early child hood socialization. Other points of view in the voluminous literature are well known, and there is no purpose in repeating them here.²Generally, they all agree that the schizophrenic is less well