This study will explore the reliability of a new paradigm to study African-American mother-child relationships. Because of the opportunity for touch, verbal interaction, affect exchange and need for maternal sensitivity to child's cues; the task of hair combing offers an alternative method to understand the socioemotional domains of African- American mother-child relationships. The objectives of this study are threefold: 1) To establish that dependent variables of Parental Style, and Affect Exchange Scales, can be reliably coded and interrater reliability established. 2) To determine if scores on maternal and child dependent variables assessed across three different contexts - Free play, Teaching tasks (The Puzzle Task for African-Americans, and Hair Combing Interactions, are positively correlated. 3) To determine if paper and pencil measures of criterion variables of Black Parental Attitudes and Racial Parental Acceptance and Rejection are the best predictors of maternal behaviors during the Hair Combing Interaction Task. A quasi- experimental design will be used to test these hypotheses. The experimental condition will be three contexts for assessments of mother- child interaction variables: Free Play, Teaching Task and Hair Combing. All procedures will occur in the university laboratory in order to control the environment. The following protocol will be followed: Consent form, Video tape of mother combing child's hair, Free play (10 minutes), the Puzzle-Task and Clean up. The mother will then be video-taped responding to an interview regarding her beliefs, attitudes and recalled experiences with hair and asked to complete the paper and pencil measures. To counter-balance order effects, one-half of the sample will begin the procedure with the Teaching task and followed by Free play, Clean up and Hair combing. The complete procedure should take between 90 to 120 minutes, depending on the length of time the mother combs the child's hair. A low-risk, non-clinical sample of N = 40 African-American, ages 20 to 35 and their infant girls, ages 12 to 36 months will be used. From this sample, a random, subsample of N = 20 will be videotaped a second time approximately 2 weeks later to establish test-retest reliability of the dependent measures. The sample will be recruited from the rosters of several local day care centers serving working and middle-income families in the city of New Orleans, Louisiana and paid $50.00 for travel experiences and participation in the study.
