Cross-cultural human development refers to similarities and differences of culture in developmental processes and expressed behavior in individuals and groups.
2. Demonstrate a familiarity with the important themes presented in this chapter including the cross-cultural perspective, ecological systems approach, developmental niche, developmental orientation, and chronological-within-topics-approach.
The cross-cultural perspective refers to studying development from the view of more than one cultural group. The ecological systems approach was created by Bronfenbrenner, and includes four levels of interaction between a child and the world: the microsystem, macrosystem, ecosystem, and mesosystem. Later versions include a chronosystem to incorporate a child's historical frame of reference into his or her development. The developmental niche is the creation of Super and Harkness, and consists of three levels: the setting, customs, and caretaker psychology. It provides a sociocultural frame of reference from which to study child development. A developmental orientation is the belief that people's behavior changes and develops continually throughout life. A chronological-within-topics approach explains development from birth to old age within each topic being discussed. This allows the reader to track the development of a specific aspect of behavior over the course of a lifetime rather than viewing all the changes together as the child ages.
3. Comment on the three goals set forth for the field of cross-cultural psychology.
The three goals of cross-cultural psychology as defined in the Gardiner text are:
1. To determine whether or not existing theories are applicable across cultures.
2. To discover differences in behavior between cultures and Learn why findings may not be generalizable across cultures.
3. To integrate findings for different cultures to create a universal theory of development that applies to a wide range of cultures and societies.
These three goals serve to make the study of human development more accurate and applicable to all people, rather than only those of the people in North America where the majority of past research has been conducted.
4. Why do the authors emphasize a practical application approach to the subject?
The authors believe that readers will gain more insight from the book if the ideas are presented in a manner that can be applied to real life situations and everyday occurrences.