Current Workshop | Overview | Back | Home | Search | | |||||||
![]() |
Children Seen and Heard Across the Globe |
![]() | ||
The field of child development research is dominated
by studies conducted in WEIRD societies (Western Educated Industrialized Rich
Democratic; Henrich et al., 2010). Thus, most of our
knowledge on child development only represents a minority of the world
population, and hampers conclusions about the culture-specificity versus
universality of the processes described in the current literature. A relatively small group of scholars from a variety of
disciplines do manage to access hard-to-reach non-WEIRD communities off the beaten
track to collect video data on a variety of child development domains. These
efforts yield wonderfully rich and valuable video data that have the potential
to uncover entirely new perspectives on various aspects of child development as
studied in a variety of disciplines. However, in reality the video materials
are generally only analyzed from a mono-disciplinary perspective, simply
because they have been collected within a particular discipline. The first ‘Children seen and heard across the globe’
workshop took place at the NIAS in Wassenaar in the
spring of 2015, and constituted the first steps towards interdisciplinary
collaborations to optimize the design of future video-based research studies so
that the collected data will be useful to various disciplines. The first
workshop was attended by 16 researchers from 9 different countries in the
fields of child and family studies, anthropology, and linguistics who each
presented their video data sets of children across the globe. The plans that
came out of the first workshop include a multidisciplinary pilot study aimed at
the cross-cultural testing of procedures and coding systems from child and
family studies, anthropology, and linguistics. The current Lorentz workshop is designed as a
follow-up meeting with the following goals: (A) Analyze the video data from a pilot study that all participants will have
conducted in the cultural communities that they have access to (B) Use the analysis of the pilot study to formulate a grant proposal for a
larger cross-cultural multidisciplinary study of child development (C) Writing and/or finalizing collaborative papers on the existing video
data that are now shared between different disciplines. [Back] |
![]() ![]() ![]() |