Paper short abstract:

Cultural schemas and models drive practices in ecocultural context. The use of these conceptual frameworks and diverse integrative methods in our field contribute to child development research on change, intervention, inequality and well-being.

Paper long abstract:

Psychological Anthropology brings rich conceptual frameworks of culture and context to studies of change, inequality, interventions, and well-being. Psychological Anthropology also supports arguably the strongest pluralistic suite of diverse research methods not only in Anthropology but across the social sciences, including many varieties of ethnography and qualitative inquiry; multiple fieldwork designs and methods; mixed qualitative and quantitative research; as well as integration with clinical methods, psychology, and sociolinguistics. There is a long history of outstanding work in this field by many of us. A productive psychocultural framework starts with children’s lives as organized into a situated, local daily routine which is constituted by activities and practices in ecocultural context. These activities consist of scripts and norms shaped by cultural schemas and models. Participation in such cultural practices is essential to the scientific study of learning itself. Activities include emotions; the resources needed to do them; the history, social structures and institutions around them; the social relationships of those involved; the goals, values and moral direction for development captured by the activity; and the predictability of activities. Now put that daily routine and its many activities making up the child’s developmental path into motion across time—biological/maturational, developmental, chronological, and culture-historical time. I will illustrate with examples from my own research focused on children: families with children with disabilities; children diagnosed with ADHD; families with children with autism in India; interventions to reduce poverty in working families; supporting communities in Kenya and Ethiopia affected by HIV/AIDS; effects of rural-urban migration in Kenya.