The Myth of Universal Sensitive Responsiveness: Comment on Mesman et al. (2017)

Keller, Heidi; Bard, Kim A.; Morelli, Gilda A.; Chaudhary, Nandita; Vicedo, Marga; Rosabal‐Coto, Mariano; Scheidecker, Gabriel; Murray, Marjorie; Gottlieb, Alma

doi:10.1111/cdev.13031

Cited by 68 publications

(83 citation statements)

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“…Of the eight instruments reviewed by Mesman and Emmen (39), seven included warmth as a major dimension of sensitivity. The original scales as well as the later versions all rest on the assumptions that it is the autonomous child who takes the lead and whose view is primary and that communication is built on the dialogic turn-taking format and the open (facial/verbal) expression of warmth (40). This concept of sensitivity is based on the dyadic and dialogic relational model between an infant and an adult interactional partner.…”

Section: Secure Attachment Is the Consequence Of Sensitive Parentalmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…2, 25-28, and 43-46) The idea that the child needs to be instructed, directed, and guided goes hand-in-hand with the view of the child as an apprentice. Thus, in many non-Western rural communities, in different but complementary ways, infants learn first and primarily the views of others and their place in the social system (40).…”

Section: Secure Attachment Is the Consequence Of Sensitive Parentalmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Universality claim of attachment theory: Children’s socioemotional development across cultures

Keller

2018

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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136

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The first part of this paper reviews the basic tenets of attachment theory with respect to differences in cultural socialization strategies. In one strategy infants have the lead, and the social environment is responsive to the infant’s wishes and preferences. In another strategy the caregivers—children or adults—are experts who know what is best for a baby without exploring his or her mental states. Accordingly, the definition of attachment is conceived as a negotiable emotional bond or a network of responsibilities. Attachment theory represents the Western middle-class perspective, ignoring the caregiving values and practices in the majority of the world. However, attachment theory claims universality in all its components. Since the claim of universality implies moral judgments about good and bad parenting, ethical questions need to be addressed. These issues are discussed in the second part of the paper. It is first demonstrated that sensitive responsiveness in attachment theory is built on a different concept of the person and self than concepts of good caregiving in many rural subsistence-based farming families. Evaluating one system with the standards of another ignores different realities and different value systems. The common practice of large-scale interventions in rural subsistence-based contexts promoting Western-style parenting strategies without knowing the local culture positions a false understanding of scientific evidence against cultural knowledge. This practice is unethical. Diversity needs to be recognized as the human condition, and the recognition of diversity is an obligation for better science as well as for improving people’s lives.

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Section: Secure Attachment Is the Consequence Of Sensitive Parentalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Secure Attachment Is the Consequence Of Sensitive Parentalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Universality claim of attachment theory: Children’s socioemotional development across cultures

Keller

2018

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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136

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“…Researchers may also impose what they view to be natural social situations between participants, (e.g., face-to-face or one-on-one interaction between mothers or infants) to assess important concepts, such as attachment or sensitivity (37). In the many cultural settings where these imposed situations are not the dominant mode of interaction (e.g., in multiple caregiver settings), observations of behavior can pose deep interpretive challenges (37)(38)(39)(40).…”

Section: Beyond the Likert Formatmentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning from failures of protocol in cross-cultural research

Hruschka

Munira

Jesmin

et al. 2018

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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The many tools that social and behavioral scientists use to gather data from their fellow humans have, in most cases, been honed on a rarefied subset of humanity: highly educated participants with unique capacities, experiences, motivations, and social expectations. Through this honing process, researchers have developed protocols that extract information from these participants with great efficiency. However, as researchers reach out to broader populations, it is unclear whether these highly refined protocols are robust to cultural differences in skills, motivations, and expected modes of social interaction. In this paper, we illustrate the kinds of mismatches that can arise when using these highly refined protocols with nontypical populations by describing our experience translating an apparently simple social discounting protocol to work in rural Bangladesh. Multiple rounds of piloting and revision revealed a number of tacit assumptions about how participants should perceive, understand, and respond to key elements of the protocol. These included facility with numbers, letters, abstract number lines, and 2D geometric shapes, and the treatment of decisions as a series of isolated events. Through onthe-ground observation and a collaborative refinement process, we developed a protocol that worked both in Bangladesh and among US college students. More systematic study of the process of adapting common protocols to new contexts will provide valuable information about the range of skills, motivations, and modes of interaction that participants bring to studies as we develop a more diverse and inclusive social and behavioral science. generalizability | diversity | cross-cultural | social discounting | Bangladesh I n 1932, the psychologist Rensis Likert (1) published his dissertation on a novel method for measuring attitudes. After giving university students printed statements about race relations, Likert asked them to check one of five options (strongly approve, approve, undecided, disapprove, and strongly disapprove) indicating how much they endorsed each of these statements. Likert then assigned numbers to these levels of approval and took an average across all statements. The simplicity of both the response format and construction of the scale soon spurred researchers to adopt elements of the technique to assess not only attitudes (Likert's original interest) but also subjective judgments along many dimensions, including likelihood, desirability, difficulty, and happiness (2). Today, after decades of testing and refinement on generations of participants, Likert's simple format has become a reliable mainstay of social and behavioral research.Given its ubiquity in the social and behavioral sciences, one might guess that a five-or seven-item Likert format is a natural way of asking humans about their subjective judgments. However, in the rare cases when researchers have described their experience using Likert items outside of formally educated populations, they have been met with mixed success (3,4). It turns out tha...

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This reply to the commentary by Keller et al (2018) on the article "Universality Without Uniformity: A Culturally Inclusive Approach to Sensitive Responsiveness in Infant Caregiving" (Mesman et al, 2017) highlights key points of agreement emphasizing the sense of investing in synergies across research traditions. These include the importance of distinguishing between different parenting constructs, the need for more studies to test the presented theoretical assumptions, and the value of examining multiple caregiver sensitivity in relation to infants' developing membership of a community.

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mentioning

confidence: 98%

“…The commentary by Keller et al (2018) on the article "Universality Without Uniformity: A Culturally Inclusive Approach to Sensitive Responsiveness in Infant Caregiving" (Mesman et al, 2017) raises several issues that I would like to address by highlighting key points of agreement that emphasize the sense of building bridges in this debate. I will discuss these issues in the order in which they were presented by Keller et al First, I agree that it would be important to evaluate all of the Ainsworth Maternal Care scales-and not just sensitive responsiveness-regarding their cross-cultural applicability.…”

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confidence: 99%

Sense and Sensitivity: A Response to the Commentary by Keller et al. (2018)

Mesman

2018

Child Development

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This reply to the commentary by Keller et al. (2018) on the article "Universality Without Uniformity: A Culturally Inclusive Approach to Sensitive Responsiveness in Infant Caregiving" (Mesman et al., 2017) highlights key points of agreement emphasizing the sense of investing in synergies across research traditions. These include the importance of distinguishing between different parenting constructs, the need for more studies to test the presented theoretical assumptions, and the value of examining multiple caregiver sensitivity in relation to infants' developing membership of a community. The only point of disagreement reflects the rigidity versus flexibility of the sensitivity construct. This reply argues that it is exactly the versatility of the sensitivity construct that makes it a valuable building block for bridges between fields.

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The Myth of Universal Sensitive Responsiveness: Comment on Mesman et al. (2017)

Cited by 68 publications

References 42 publications

Universality claim of attachment theory: Children’s socioemotional development across cultures

Universality claim of attachment theory: Children’s socioemotional development across cultures

Learning from failures of protocol in cross-cultural research

Sense and Sensitivity: A Response to the Commentary by Keller et al. (2018)

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