A landscape approach to understanding child identity development in violent contexts

在全球范围内，暴力对儿童的影响尤为严重，但令人惊讶的是，人们对儿童在暴力环境中的作用和生活知之甚少。研究记录了儿童受害情况，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，以及儿童为科普生活中的暴力而采取的具体行动。从儿童是生活的积极因素以及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卫生危机。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和应对其长期影响的方案和政策至关重要。这项研究将由范德比尔特大学的心理和认知人类学家诺伯特·罗斯博士进行，他以儿童认知发展的跨文化研究而闻名。研究人员选择萨尔瓦多作为研究地点有两个首要原因。首先，各种暴力在萨尔瓦多猖獗，无论是在现在还是在过去的记忆中，往往是年轻人移民到美国的动力。更好地理解移民的这些根源有助于制定更有效的政策来控制移民。第二，在一个相对较小的国家，暴力的普遍存在使其更可行（比在美国）。进行一项关于儿童对普遍存在的暴力环境的谈判和接受的科学研究。研究人员将通过一套方法收集数据，包括观察儿童在学校，家庭和游戏中的各种自然环境中的互动;使用既定的，儿童特定的和儿童敏感的协议与儿童进行简短访谈;家庭访谈和焦点小组;以及地理参考的，暴力特定景观的记忆映射。此外，由于在道德和生产力方面与年幼儿童合作的挑战，该项目引入了新的研究方法，为在暴力环境中对儿童进行人种学研究提供了新的方法，研究小组聘请了当地儿童心理学家担任顾问。研究结果将与公众、儿童工作者、政策制定者和其他社会科学家分享。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值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.