Envisioning an African Child Development Field

Institutionalization of an African child development field is a necessary aspect of strategies for strengthening the continent’s contributions to a global knowledge base. A disciplinary structure advances inquiry as it facilitates professionalization and provides space to formulate the canons and conventions that will guide knowledge production and the preparation and socialization of future researchers. Using the term disciplinary development to denote the process of bringing such a field about, this article outlines a pathway to disciplinary development, emphasizing important lessons that must be learned from (a) internal challenges to knowledge production in African universities, (b) Euro-American psychology’s disciplinary development history, and (c) the movement to institutionalize psychology in non-Western countries. The issues addressed have relevance to other non-Western societies

Early childhood development in Africa: interrogating constraints of prevailing knowledge bases

The past two decades have been characterized by renewed attention to the importance of early childhood development (ECD) policies and services in the world\u27s richest and most industrialized countries. During the same period, we have witnessed unprecedented efforts to place ECD policies on the national development planning agenda of the economically less advantaged countries of the Majority World. This paper is premised on the concern that the purposes that have led bilateral and multilateral international agencies to promote and support ECD services in Africa may also be paving the way for uncritical adoption of program and service delivery models grounded in value systems and knowledge bases that may not be appropriate for the continent. We present two critiques to highlight the dangers of ignoring the sociocultural contexts of the knowledge bases that inform ECD policies and practices. We describe one capacity-building effort, under the auspices of the Early Childhood Development Virtual University (ECDVU), to promote culturally relevant knowledge and prepare leadership personnel for Africa\u27s emerging ECD movement. Finally, based on an exercise designed for an ECDVU cohort to engage and reflect on critiques of mainstream research and theorizing on child development, we share insights that are suggestive of the ways in which African perspectives can contribute to and enrich a global knowledge base on child development

Bridging Culture, Research, and Practice in Early Childhood Development: The Madrasa Resource Centers in East Africa

The Madrasa Resource Centers in East Africa have adapted features of Euro-American theory and practice into a service delivery system responding to local cultural and socioeconomic realities. After 25 years of implementation in predominantly Muslim communities with high poverty and low literacy rates, the program could serve as a model for other parts of the continent with similar population profiles. This article examines some of the program’s key features and discusses the prospects that the program’s integration of research into service delivery holds for developmental research in the region. It proposes that university partnerships with such programs could yield productive inquiry with benefits to local universities, community-based programs, and developmental science

Attitudes to and management of HIV/AIDS among health workers in Ghana: the case of Cape Coast municipality

Health Care Workers as key players in the prevention and management of diseases and important opinion and community leaders have become targets for studies, more so with the outbreak of HIV. Their perceptions, attitudes and practices have implications for the management of diseases in both health centres and communities. This study reports some of the results of in-depth interviews with Health Care Workers in the Cape Coast municipality (Ghana) on their perception of risk of exposure to HIV, attitudes to known persons with HIV/AIDS, counselling and confidentiality. Results indicate a general fear of infection given the working environment and conditions such as the insufficient supply of basic items, and inadequate information on the sero-status of some patients. Although aware of the basic precautions needed to avoid infection, some health workers did not follow them. There was also a lack of consensus among them on the issues of confidentiality and responsibility towards a discordant partner. The main arguments were those of the general debate between safeguarding individual rights and protecting the common good. It is important for the medical establishment to debate the issue so that the rights of some individuals are not compromised

Early developmental and psychosocial risks and longitudinal behavioral adjustment outcomes for preschool-age girls adopted from China

The central goal of this longitudinal study was to examine behavioral adjustment outcomes in a sample of preschool-age adopted Chinese girls. Research examining the effects of institutional deprivation on post-adoption behavioral outcomes for internationally adopted children has been constrained by the frequent unavailability of data on the institutional experiences of adopted children. Using child-level measures of the residual effects of pre-adoption deprivation or adversity, the present study of 452 preschool-age girls adopted from China tested the hypothesis that these measures will better predict behavioral adjustment (as measured on the CBCL/1½–5) than age at adoption (AAA), used conventionally as a proxy measure of the magnitude of deprivation effects. Along with AAA (M = 13.1 months, SD = 5.1), our measures were used to predict behavioral adjustment at two time points (Mage = 2.7 years at Time 1 and 4.8 years at Time 2). There was strong stability in behavioral adjustment across time, and the regression results showed that delays in social skills, refusal/avoidance behaviors, and crying/clinging behaviors at the time of adoption, rather than AAA, predicted behavioral adjustment outcomes

Experimental Analysis of Question Wording in an Instrument Measuring Teachers’ Attitudes Toward Inclusive Education

An experimental study (n = 288 general and special education teachers) examining the effects of altering the referent (“students with mild disabilities,” “students with severe disabilities,” or “students with disabilities”) on a four-item scale (Negative Effect of Inclusion) indicated that wording changes had little effect on the scale’s psychometric properties (e.g., factor pattern coefficients). Changes did result in a shift in the mean level of the attitude scale. Regression coefficients between the scale and type of teacher, total years of teaching experience, years of experience at current school, and training in inclusion were not significantly altered by changing the referent. Gender was the only predictor that exhibited a lack of invariance in its regression coefficients across questionnaire forms that differed in referent. For most of the bivariate relationships examined in this study, the same conclusions would be drawn no matter which of the three referents were used

Special needs adoption from China: Exploring child-level indicators, adoptive family characteristics, and correlates of behavioral adjustment

Since 1994, China has been a leading source of international adoptions in the US, and since 2000, an increasing number of these children have entered the country under the special needs classification. While there is a large body of research on domestic special needs adoptions, very little is known about special needs adoptions from China. This study took advantage of a large survey of 1096 adopted Chinese children to explore a number of questions on special needs adoptions from China. The sample included 124 children adopted under the special needs classification. In addition to parental reports of child behavioral problems on the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL), data on age at adoption, type of special needs, pre-adoption adversity, developmental delays at adoption, and Initial Adaptation to Adoption were collected retrospectively from the adoptive parents. The analysis revealed no differences between special needs (SN) and non-special needs (NS) children on any of the measures. In addition, the nature of the disabilities associated with the SN classification for many of the children may not pose significant challenges to optimal development. Policy and practice implications are discussed in light of these findings

Factor structure and clinical implications of child behavior checklist/1.5-5 ratings in a sample of girls adopted from China

Objective: This study assessed psychometric properties of the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL/1.5-5) and explored clinical insights from its use in a sample of adopted Chinese girls. Methods: Parental ratings were obtained on 707 adopted Chinese girls, ages 1.50-5.92 years (M = 3.24, SD = 1.26). Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), employing robust weighted least squares estimation, was used to evaluate the instrument\u27s seven-factor correlated structure. Profiles of scores were analyzed descriptively for clinical insights. Results: The CFAs indicated that the fit of Achenbach and Rescorla\u27s (2000 Manual for the ASEBA preschool forms & profiles. Burlington, VT: University of Vermont, Research Centre for Children, Youth, & Families) model to the data obtained from the adopted Chinese girls was acceptable using either a 2-point response scale or the original 3-point response scale for the 67 items from which the seven syndromes or correlated factors are derived. Values for the root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) for the 2-point and 3-point response scales were .049 and .053, respectively. The RMSEA of .049 for the model using the dichotomously scored items was slightly better than what Achenbach and Rescorla (2000) reported for the same model (.06). Conclusions: The study provides additional evidence of the factorial validity of the CBCL/1.5-5 and supports its use with Chinese girls adopted into North American families. While the Chinese girls showed similar or better behavioral adjustment, compared to a reference group from the CBCL\u27s normative sample, they tended to manifest higher levels of sleep problems

Strengthening Africa’s Contributions to Child Development Research: Introduction

The articles in this Special Section are based on contributions to an SRCD-sponsored invitational conference held in Victoria, Canada, in February 2009. This introductory article establishes the rationale for focusing on Africa as part of an effort to advance a more inclusive science of child development, provides a brief overview of the thrust of the other articles in the section, describes 2 research capacity-building initiatives that emerged from the conference, and concludes with reflective perspectives on conceptual and methodological considerations for a future African child development field

THE HOMONYMIC CHAIN MODEL (HCM) AS A TOOL FOR MULTIPLE SENSE ANALYSIS

Many scholars – e.g. Glover (2005), Sekyi-Baidoo (2006) and Falkum (2010) – have expressed some concerns about Word Sense Multiplicity (WSM), which explains multiple meanings as part of a word. In other words, WSM is an integral part of any natural language including Akan on which this paper concentrates. As Agyekum (2002; 2005) and Levin (1993) observe, with WSM, users and researchers of language dwell on a particular sense of a word deeming it as an underlying representation of all other senses. In this paper, however, from the perspective of the homonymic and polysemic nature of a word, we seek to explore the Homonymic Chain Model (Oppong-Asare, 2012) as a tool for expressing the multiple meanings words in languages in descriptive terms. The model attempts to simplify the understanding of the various meanings of a word by conceptualizing its diverse senses. As will also be exhibited pictorially, the Homonymic Chain Model (HCM) also explains that a particular word may have two or more distinct meanings and each of the meanings may also have other related senses. As part of our conclusion, we contend among others that apart from aiding students and language learners to recognize and comprehend different senses of a word more clearly, HCM could also facilitate the work of translators working with Akan