Cultural and educational variations in maternal responsiveness.

Abstract

Two separate studies examined the following hypotheses: (a) that maternal responsiveness is af-fected by cross-cultural differences in conventions of conversational interaction, and (b) that ma-ternal responsiveness is affected by intracultural differences in mothers ' levels of formal education. The first study compared mother-infant interactions among the Gusii of Kenya with those in suburban Boston, Massachusetts. The second study, carried out in the Mexican city of Cuernavaca, examined variations in mother-infant interactions by maternal schooling within a local sample of low-income mothers of similar cultural backgrounds who had attended school from 1 to 9 years. The 2 studies together indicate that maternal responsiveness during infancy, particularly in the verbal mode, is influenced by the mother's cultural background and school attendance, that is, by factors that reflect her history of participation in institutionalized systems of communication and education. Child development research in the United States has often shown maternal responsiveness to infants to be predictive of their subsequent cognitive and emotional behavior (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978; Bornstein, 1989; Clarke-Stewart, 1973; Martin, 1981). In some studies, socioeconomic and cul-tural factors are deliberately controlled through sample selec-tion so that their effects will not be confounded with those of maternal responsiveness. Other studies have shown maternal behavior during infancy to be associated with variations in cul-ture, ethnicity, socioeconomic status (SES), and maternal educa-

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