A landscape approach to understanding child identity development in violent contexts

在全球范围内，暴力对儿童的影响不成比例，但令人惊讶的是，人们对儿童在暴力环境中的角色和生活知之甚少。研究记录了受害儿童的情况，但没有全面和系统地探讨儿童如何理解不同形式暴力的性质、原因和相互作用，以及儿童为应对生活中的暴力而采取的具体行动。从儿童是生活中的积极因素和环境的受害者这一前提出发，该奖项支持的研究将调查这些主题。这项研究很重要：在美国，暴力被描述为儿童的公共健康危机。了解接触不同形式的暴力如何塑造儿童的世界观和应对策略，对于制定支持儿童复原力并对抗其长期影响的方案和政策至关重要。这项研究将由心理学和认知人类学家范德比尔特大学的诺伯特·罗斯博士进行，他以对儿童认知发展的跨文化研究而闻名。这位研究人员选择萨尔瓦多作为研究地点有两个主要原因。首先，各种暴力在萨尔瓦多猖獗，在现在和过去的记忆中，往往是年轻人移民到美国的动力。更好地了解移民的这些根源可以帮助制定更有效的政策来控制移民。其次，暴力在一个相对较小的国家的普遍存在使其更具可行性(比在美国)。对儿童对普遍存在的暴力环境的谈判和接受进行科学研究。研究人员将通过一系列方法收集数据，包括观察儿童在学校、家庭和游戏中在各种自然环境中的互动；使用既定的、针对儿童的和对儿童敏感的协议对儿童进行简短采访；家庭访谈和焦点小组；以及地理参照的特定暴力场景的记忆映射。此外，由于在道德上和富有成效地处理年幼儿童方面的挑战，该项目引入了新的研究方法，将提供对暴力环境中的儿童进行人种学研究的新方法，研究小组吸收了当地的儿童心理学家作为顾问。这项研究的结果将与公众、儿童工作者、政策制定者和其他社会科学家分享。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Globally, violence has been found to affect children disproportionately, yet surprisingly little is known about children's roles and lives in violent settings. Research has documented child victimization but has not explored holistically and systematically how children understand the nature, causes, and interactions of different forms of violence, and the specific actions that children take to cope with violence in their lives. Working from the premise that children are active agents living their lives as well as victims of circumstance, the research supported by this award will investigate these topics. The research is important: in the United States, violence has been described as a public health crisis for children. Understanding how exposure to different forms of violence shapes children's worldviews and coping strategies is critical for developing programs and policies that support children's resilience and counter its long-term effects. The research will be conducted by psychological and cognitive anthropologist, Dr. Norbert Ross of Vanderbilt University, who is well-known for his cross-cultural research on cognitive development in children. The researcher has chosen El Salvador as the research site for two overarching reasons. First, violence of all kinds is rampant in El Salvador, in the present and in memories of the past, and often is the impetus for young people migrating to the United States. Better understanding of these roots of migration can help to develop more effective policies to control it. Second, the prevalence of violence in a comparatively small country makes it more feasible (than it would be in the U.S.) to conduct a scientific study of children's negotiations of and uptakes of pervasively violent environments. The researcher will collect data through a suite of methods including observations of children's interactions in a variety of natural settings at school, home, and play; brief interviews with children using established, child-specific and child-sensitive protocols; family interviews and focus groups; and memory mappings of geo-referenced, violence-specific landscapes. In addition, because of the challenges of working with younger children ethically and productively, the project introduces novel research methods that will provide new ways of conducting ethnographic research with children in violent environments and the research team incorporates local child psychologists as consultants. Findings from the research will be shared with the general public, practitioners who work with children, policy makers, and other social scientists.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.