Responsiveness and rules: parent-child interaction in Scotland and India

This study analyses interaction between seven year old children and their parents in India and Britain. Sixteen families were selected in Hyderabad, India (of middle- and working- classes), and seven families in Edinburgh (also of both social classes). These families were studied intensively, and ten hours of natural interaction were recorded in each, during the evenings. The analyses focussed on essentially two broad (and conceptually interlinked) areas of interaction: i) parent-child responsiveness, positive affect and sharing, and ii) representations of structure as analysed through sequences of directives and compliance, and references to rules. In the analyses, two essential arguments were focussed upon: a) that families in the two cultures differ in the significance of various patterns of behaviour in line with ideological trends of the culture (eg., the salience of regulations and order, and the importance of interpersonal means of managing interactions rather than the impersonal means of regulation.) and b) that Social Learning Theory and Piagetian Theory are essentially inadequate in their generality across cultures. It was concluded that Psychological theories which are ideologically contradictory to the cultural context are inadequate for explaining behaviour in meaningful terms, and that the two cultures showed patterns of behaviour which were significantly different in the relevant respects