Measuring Attachment Representations in Rural and Poor African American Children

描述（由申请人提供）：测量农村和贫困的非裔美国儿童的依恋代表性。许多行为科学家认为，人的发展是一个动态的过程，自我调节的结构和功能是在发展中的儿童与环境之间的相互作用中发展起来的。从这一角度来看，儿童和环境随着时间的推移而相互转化，因为早期的适应模式因环境变化而发生变化，而环境特征在个人身上表现不同，因此具有不同的意义和影响。这种发展概念对于指导旨在了解儿童在向正规学校教育过渡等关键发展过渡期间适应新环境和挑战的研究十分重要。在向学校过渡的过程中，儿童在正式的课堂环境中遇到了新的权威人物、表现标准、活动和规则，并与同龄人和成年人进行了各种各样的新的社会交往。儿童理解和表现他人情绪和行为的方式与儿童与同龄人和教师的关系以及学校成功的广泛指标有关。关于这一主题的研究强调了依恋关系对后期功能的重要性，许多人认为这种影响取决于儿童将互动模式转化为关系表征。尽管这些陈述具有潜在的重要性，但很少将其作为儿童适应早期教育的一部分进行研究，特别是在农村、低收入和少数民族地位导致学业失败的高风险儿童中研究不足。研究这一现象的障碍之一是缺乏对农村、低收入、非裔美国儿童学龄早期依恋代表性的验证。在这个应用程序中，我们寻求支持探索曼彻斯特儿童依恋故事任务（MCAST）作为一个有效的和可靠的措施，农村，低收入的非洲裔美国幼儿园儿童的依恋代表。我们还试图探讨是否依恋表示在农村，低收入的非洲裔美国儿童的母亲照顾和孩子的适应正规教育之间的联系进行调解。为了实现这一目标，我们将使用正在进行的纵向研究，家庭生活项目（FLP）的主题，增加测量本申请资助已经收集的信息。这项研究非常适合以具有成本效益的方式探索我们的问题。FLP是一个计划项目，在北卡罗来纳州和宾夕法尼亚州的6个农村县收集了1200多名儿童及其家庭的流行病学样本。我们将从低收入的非裔美国人家庭中随机抽取200名北卡罗来纳州儿童作为子样本。这个样本量给了我们很好的权力，探索问题的附件表示使用MCAST。 公共卫生相关性：目前的项目解决的具体问题，有关儿童如何内化与他们的主要照顾者的关系，然后可能使用这些代表，以指导他们如何互动，并形成新的关系，与教师和同龄人在过渡到学校。这些过程可能是特别翔实的早期家庭经验如何继续影响社会情感的发展和家庭环境之外的功能。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Measuring Attachment Representations in Rural and Poor African American Children. The development of the person is considered by many behavioral scientists to involve a dynamic process whereby self-regulatory structures and functions grow from the collaborative interplay between the developing child and the environment. The child and environment are seen from this perspective as mutually transformative over time as earlier patterns of adaptation are transformed by environmental change while environmental features are represented differently by individuals and thus have different meaning and influence. This conceptualization of development is important in guiding research aimed at understanding the child's adaptation to new settings and challenges during key developmental transitions such as the transition to formal schooling. In the transition to school the child encounters new authority figures, standards of performance, and activities and rules in the formal classroom setting, as well as engages in a wide variety of new social interactions with peers and adults. The way in which the child understands and represents the emotion and behaviors of others has been related to children's relationships with their peers and teachers and to broad indicators of school success. Research on this topic highlights the importance of attachment relationships on later functioning, an effect considered by many to be dependent on the child's translation of interaction patterns into relationship representations. Despite the potential importance of these representations, they are rarely studied as part of the adaptation that children make to early schooling and are particularly understudied among children who are at high risk for school failure because of rural, low income, and minority status. One of the barriers to study of this phenomenon is the lack of validation of a measure of attachment representation for rural, low-income, African American children at early school age. In this application we seek support for exploring the Manchester Child Attachment Story Tasks (MCAST) as a valid and reliable measure of attachment representation for rural, low-income African American kindergarten children. We also seek to explore whether attachment representations in rural, low-income African American children serve to mediate the link between maternal care and the child's adaptation to formal schooling. To accomplish this aim, we will use subjects from an ongoing longitudinal study, the Family Life Project (FLP), adding measurement funded by this application to already collected information. This study is ideally suited to explore our questions in a cost-efficient manner. The FLP is a program project in which an epidemiological sample of over 1200 children and their families were enlisted in 6 rural counties in North Carolina and Pennsylvania. We will randomly draw a subsample of 200 North Carolina children from low income, African American families. This sample size gives us good power to explore questions regarding attachment representations using the MCAST. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: The current project addresses specific issues related to how children internalize relationships with their primary caregivers and then potentially use those representations to guide how they interact and form new relationships with teachers and peers during the transition to school. These processes may be particularly informative regarding how early familial experience continue to influence socioemotional development and functioning outside of the family environment.