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Presenting an innovative take on researching early childhood, this book provides an international comparison of the cultural and familial influences that shape the growth of young children. The book presents a unique methodology, and includes chapters on musicality, security, humour and eating.

Capturing lived childhoods without decontextualizing their meaning and still providing information needed by policy-makers and practitioners is a pressing challenge for contemporary researchers. In this paper we provide information to open up such a dialogue via a range of tools we have utilized when investigating well-being. We interrogate bio-socio-ecological approaches to human development to provide relatively holistic pictures of the lived experience of childhood. We utilize various methodologies within this approach to determine what they transactionally facilitate at each level. At the bio-psychological level, for example, controlled, psychologically valid, psychosocial stress procedures expose hormonal responses, yielding valuable information about individual differences in physiological stress reactivity. At the level of the psychological self within a social ecology, we systematically observe children and youth in naturalistic, environmental transactions with the aid of visual methodologies such as <em>Day in the Life</em> filming, and invite the children and their parents and youth to share their reflections on their lived context via focused discussions and interviews. In this paper we discuss new ways of integrating research findings by suggesting Sameroff's (2010) unified theory as an interpretive framework for research within the field of child and youth care.

Vygotsky (1962) has described the course of human cognitive growth, stating that children classify first "syncretically", then "complexively", and ultimately "conceptually". The only chronological milestone which he specifies is puberty, at which time the potential for true conceptual behavior is believed to have developed. This study identifies Vygotsky's phases of conceptual development in normal school aged children. It also examines his assumption that verbal labels are critical to the development of concepts. Thirty 8-year-old and thirty 11-year-old school children were tested using the Vygotsky block-sorting task. One-third of the children at each age were given in original sorting, standard nonsense labels, one-third familiar labels, and one-third no labels. Subjects were subsequently requested to re-sort the blocks with no labels provided, and then to sort a new set of objects using the same dimensions as in original sorting, to test for transfer effects. Both qualitative and quantitative measures of performance indicate that there is a significant change in sorting behavior from 8 to 11 years of age, with cornplexive sorting predominating at both ages. The effects of labeling treatments failed to support Vygotsky's contention, at least with children at these ages, that nonsense labels facilitate performance or transfer. However, familiar labels facilitated performance over both nonsense and no labels. Transfer of the originally trained concepts was positive and the relationship between original performance and transfer was significant.

This study investigated, through an attachment theoretical lens, the relationship between first-year university students' personal and academic adjustment and 3 psychosocial resources: parental attachment, student resources (parental support, social support, ways of reducing loneliness, emotion regulation, coping strategies, locus of control), and gender. Participants answered questionnaires relating to their psychosocial resources and post-secondary adjustment in first and second term. These data were analysed using a planned regression analysis. In Term 1, paternal attachment predicted students' emotional adjustment, with social and personal resources accounting for this relationship, and was related to academic adjustment via locus of control. Maternal attachment predicted academic adjustment. Gender and locus of control predicted academic performance (as measured by grade point average [GPA]). In Term 2, parental attachment predicted emotional adjustment, with social support accounting for this relationship, but academic adjustment was no longer related to paternal attachment. Overall, gender and locus of control predicted academic success. Suggestions are made for developing transitional theoretical models that address psychosocial processes that will help shape responsive institutional programming and planning in support of incoming college students. These recommendations include designing more personalized programs to match students and their family systems where possible and keeping parents/guardians informed of helpful supports for students' experiences when needed.

AbstractAccording to moral pluralism theory, people practice moral reasoning based on several fundamental dimensions, including honesty and loyalty. As individuals navigate increasingly complex social worlds over development, they may face the dilemmas where honesty collides with loyalty. In the current study, adolescents (15‐ to 18‐year‐olds, N = 203) in a western, multicultural Canadian city read moral dilemmas involving a protagonist learning that an athlete cheated in a sports event. We manipulated the relationship between the protagonist and the cheater (best friends or compatriots) between subjects and the protagonist's responses (telling a loyal lie or the disloyal truth) within subjects. We examined participants' first‐person behavioral intentions (choices) in the hypothetical dilemmas and third‐party judgments of protagonists' morality. These adolescents projected that they personally would be more inclined to tell a loyal lie for a friend than their country, but older adolescents were more likely to lie for their country than younger ones. Participants judged telling disloyal truths to expose a friend significantly less favorably than disloyal truths to expose a country. These adolescents reflected upon loyalty and caring, honesty and fairness, and nonmoral practical factors when justifying their choices and judgments. The current study advances our understanding of moral development by revealing that with sophisticated social‐cognitive capacities, adolescents can coordinate different fundamental moral values when rendering their moral reasoning.

This paper offers socio‐ecological, situated perspectives on adolescent resilience derived from an application of interpretive visual methodologies to deepen understanding of adaptive youth development in diverse majority‐world cultural contexts (SouthAfrica,Thailand,China,Mexican migration toCanada). The research is not "cross‐cultural"; by contrast, it situates youth engagement contextually, using local perspectives, especially perspectives of adolescents themselves, on "growing up well" under adverse circumstances, to interrogate conceptions of resilience in cultural context. Participants are viewed as members of cultural communities: observations with a small number of individuals are not generalized to national groups. Rather, knowledge gained by these methods is employed to enrich knowledge of the processes of majority‐world youth thriving despite such adversities as poverty and social displacement.