The proposed project consists of two studies related to the normative psychological development of Puerto Rican and Dominican toddlers. The first study will be an examination of Puerto Rican and Dominican cultural beliefs as related to socialization goals and childrearing techniques. The method used will be focus groups of mothers, fathers, and grand- mothers of Puerto Rican and Dominican background of varying socioeconomic levels. The goals will be to create lists of developmental tasks and associated childrearing techniques for the early childhood years and to rank normative developmental tasks and childrearing techniques from Euro- American samples. These results will be used in the second study to develop an instrument to measure Puerto Rican and Dominican parenting beliefs and to modify and adapt measures of child development so that they are culturally sensitive to this population. The instruments to be modified include a measure of overall development (a Spanish version of the Revised Bayley Scales), two measures of mastery motivation (one a maternal report and one a set of standardized tasks) and a maternal report self-concept measure. The measures of mastery motivation and self-concept will be developed using the process of decentering, and reliability and validity information will be obtained during the process of development. The goal of both studies is to lay the foundation for the study of the factors contributing to individual differences in mastery motivation and self-concept development during toddlerhood in Puerto Rican and Dominican infants.
| Busch-Rossnagel, Nancy A (2002) Creating culturally sensitive and community-sensitive measures of development. New Dir Child Adolesc Dev :57-65 |
