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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Parent-child communication as a function of parental education, sex of parent and child and situational factors

subject

description

Parent-child communication was studied in different contexts (home vs laboratory, variation between and within the tasks, dyad vs triad). The subjects were 48 Finnish families with a four-year-old child. The families were divided into euqual groups of lower and higher parental education. The experiments were carried out in two stages: the first in the laboratory setting and the second in the laboratory setting or at home. The videotaped situations consisted of different cooperative tasks. The first result based on global ratings of dyads and triads (initiation/guidance, cooperation, emotionality) and on evaluation of parents’ teaching styles showed only minor differences in interactional measures, whereas the higher education parents used more mentally demanding teaching styles than the lower education parents. In addition, the particular nature of the tasks and the phase of the task was found to be essential to the forms of interaction.