Design and Methods

Abstract

The effects of parents’ child-rearing practices on children’s behavior, and children’s reciprocal effects on parents, were studied via three approaches: naturalistic observation in the home, interviews and overall ratings, and experiment in the laboratory playroom. Primary emphasis was placed on objective recording of detailed behavior in an unstructured situation. We also conducted two interviews with the mother and obtained a 24-hour record of events (a “diary”) from her, we summed up the evidence from the direct observation as well as from these probes by means of global ratings of child and parent characteristics. In addition, as a complementary approach, we constructed experimental tasks that elicited the same child characteristics that were under study in the home observation. How useful this procedure was will be discussed below.