This Minority Post-Doctoral Research and Training Grant in the Social and Behavioral Sciences examines the roles of cultural values and disability-related characteristics on parental expectations, attributions, and behaviors, and will involve two groups of parent-child dyads, Asian and non-Asian. The first group of children with Down syndrome who are not Asian would tease apart the effects of characteristics associated with the disorder on parental expectations, attributions, and behaviors. The second group of Asian children with Down syndrome would illustrate the roles that child characteristics and cultural-specific characteristics play in parental attributions. Parents will be asked to interact with their child in completing a difficult cognitive task. Parental expectations, attributions, reactions, and behaviors will be elicited through questionnaire and videotaped interactions. The hypothesis to be tested is that parents of children with Down syndrome from non-Asian backgrounds will make attributions of low ability and provide more help and encouragement during the interactions. In contrast, Asian parents with stronger effort-related beliefs will have a greater difficulty accepting their child.s lower task persistence. These parents will be more likely to exhibit anger and offer less help during the interactions. Human subjects approval will be obtained from the Office for Protection of Research Subjects before any participants will be recruited. In order to conduct this and related studies, the researcher needs a more in-depth understanding of attributional and ethnic minority research. The researcher's primary training objective is to learn a about the conceptual, methodological, and ethical concerns related to these two areas of research with children with disabilities. Specifically, measuring attributions in the form of reactions and behaviors as they occur during parent-child interactions requires a descriptive and comprehensive coding system and an understanding of the linkages among attributions, reactions, and behaviors. The secondary training objective is to be aware of and sensitive to the issues and needs involved in conducting ethnic minority research. The Fellow will work with Professor Sandra Graham, a developmental social psychologist at UCLA who primarily studies motivation and social behavior from an attributional perspective. The Fellow will also consult with two attribution researchers, Bernard Weiner and Jaana Juvonen, in the Psychology department and an ethnic minority researcher, Mitchell Chang, in the Education department.
