Journal of Cross-Cultural

http://jcc.sagepub.com/
Psychology

The Six Cultures Study: Prologue to a History of a Landmark Project

Robert A. LeVine
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 2010 41: 513
DOI: 10.1177/0022022110362567

The online version of this article can be found at:

http://jcc.sagepub.com/content/41/4/513

Published by:

http://www.sagepublications.com

On behalf of:

International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology

Additional services and information for Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology can be found at:

Email Alerts: http://jcc.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts

Subscriptions: http://jcc.sagepub.com/subscriptions

Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav

Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

Citations: http://jcc.sagepub.com/content/41/4/513.refs.html

>> Version of Record - Jul 20, 2010

What is This?

Downloaded from jcc.sagepub.com at PONTIFICIA UNIV CATOLICA on June 11, 2013

Part II:The Whiting’s Contributions to Theory, Methods, and Empirical Research
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology

The Six Cultures Study: 41(4) 513­–521

© The Author(s) 2010
Reprints and permission:
Prologue to a History sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0022022110362567

of a Landmark Project jccp.sagepub.com

Robert A. LeVine1

Abstract
The Six Cultures Study of Socialization (SCSS), launched in the middle of the 20th century, was
an unprecedented cross-cultural project of field research on child rearing and development in
diverse settings. Nothing quite so ambitious has been attempted since then—more than 50
years on—so the SCSS deserves scholars’ attention as an historical landmark that inspired
future work and exemplifies the possibilities and problems of comparative research on child
development.This article is not a full intellectual history of the project, which would be based on
primary documents and a cross-validated oral history, but the reflections of one participant who
has remained in this field. The author’s focus is on the roots of the SCSS, the project as it was
actually carried out and as it changed after the field work was completed, and its implications
for future research.

Keywords
socialization, child rearing practices, cross-cultural studies, Hullian behavior theory, naturalistic
observations

Roots of the Six Cultures Study of Socialization

The Six Cultures Study of Socialization (SCSS) began in 1954 under unusual auspices. It involved
investigators at three universities (Harvard, Yale, and Cornell), supported by the recently estab-
lished Behavioral Sciences Division of the Ford Foundation with a grant of $350,000, a large
sum at the time (worth at least $2.6 million in 2006 dollars). The project had been conceptualized
and initially planned at meetings sponsored by the Committee on Social Behavior of the Social
Science Research Council (SSRC), which gave it the aura of an official initiative by the social
sciences into childhood socialization among non-Western peoples.
The intellectual roots of the Six Cultures Study were in the two major interdisciplinary cen-
ters of the mid-20th century, the Yale Institute of Human Relations (in the 1930s and 1940s) and
the Harvard Department of Social Relations (1940s and 1950s), in both of which the cross-
cultural study of child socialization was considered a theoretically significant area of research
(J. W. M. Whiting, 1994b). John W. M. Whiting, an anthropologist trained at Yale in the 1930s
who joined the Harvard faculty in 1949, spearheaded the project, but his collaborators, the social

1
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

Corresponding Author:
Robert A. LeVine, Harvard University, 35 Hillside Terrace, Belmont, MA 02478
Email: levine68@gmail.com

Downloaded from jcc.sagepub.com at PONTIFICIA UNIV CATOLICA on June 11, 2013

514 Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 41(4)

psychologists Irvin L. Child at Yale (also trained at Yale in the 1930s) and William W. Lambert
of Cornell (trained at Harvard in the 1940s), were equally committed to interdisciplinary work.
Their ideas and methods in approaching the socialization of the child had been formulated earlier
at Yale where, in 1946, Whiting and Child began work on their book, Child Training and Personal-
ity: A Cross-Cultural Study, published in 1953. In that book they reformulated Freudian developmental
hypotheses in terms of Hullian behavior theory and tested them with published ethnographic data
on a worldwide sample of 75 societies.
John Whiting has described how the book, published just as he became director of the Labo-
ratory of Human Development at Harvard in 1953, led to the SCSS:

In discussing the inadequacy of available ethnographic materials on infancy and childhood

with Bob Sears [his predecessor as director and a recent president of the American Psycho-
logical Association] I suggested that we ought to collect our own data. He agreed and arranged
for me to present my case to a Social Science Research Council committee . . . of which he
was a member. I presented the Whiting model [of culture and personality formulated in the
Whiting and Child book] to the committee and argued that if we were to develop a general
theory of personality development, field studies should be carried out on a world sample of a
hundred societies. The committee felt that a sample of a hundred was a bit extreme but if
I were willing to reduce the number they agreed to support a working seminar at Palfrey
House [at Harvard] to develop a detailed research plan. (J. W. M. Whiting, 1994a, p. 28)

The working seminar, led by Whiting, included as participants the anthropologists A. Kimball
Romney and Hildred Geertz, who were graduate students at Harvard, and psychologists Eleanor
Maccoby and George Goethals. The seminar group produced a Field Manual for the Cross-
Cultural Study of Child Rearing (J. W. M. Whiting et al., 1953) that was discussed at meetings
that included the psychologists M. Brewster Smith (then working at the Social Science
Research Council), Alfred Baldwin, Gardner Lindzey, Daniel Miller, and Robert Sears and
anthropologists David F. Aberle, Benjamin Paul, and John M. Roberts. At the final conference,
“the strengths and weaknesses of various research strategies were discussed” (J. W. M. Whiting
et al., 1966, p. xi).
The Ford Foundation grant supported 1 year of field work in five societies followed by 2 years
of analysis. The project was called “A Study of Socialization in Five Societies,” the sixth being
added later, as described below. John Whiting’s desire for 100 societies, however impractical in
the short run, was based on the goal of statistically testing hypotheses at the cross-cultural level.
He foresaw that with five or six societies the formal testing of hypotheses could be conducted
only at the level of individual differences within a society, leaving the comparative analysis
problematic. Despite this curtailment of Whiting’s dream at the outset of the project, he and his
collaborators believed that the project would become a model for future comparative socializa-
tion research and that others would eventually extend the project’s reach to societies around the
world.
Whiting was thoroughly imbued with the theory-first model of science of the Yale Institute.
Following this “hypothetico-deductive” model, based on the idealized conception of physics
promoted by logical positivist philosophers of science, empirical research is conducted to test the
validity of hypotheses deductively generated from a major scientific theory. Thus, the socializa-
tion project was initially conceptualized not as exploratory or inductive but instead as testing the
validity of the theory of culture and personality constructed at Yale by Whiting and Child, based
on thinking by John Dollard and others.
The theory incorporated Clark L. Hull’s behavior theory (largely based on habit-formation
experiments with laboratory animals), Bronislaw Malinowski’s functional theory of culture, and

Downloaded from jcc.sagepub.com at PONTIFICIA UNIV CATOLICA on June 11, 2013

LeVine 515

Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic conception of development and psychodynamics. Whiting had

studied with Hull and Malinowski as a postdoctoral fellow at Yale, 1938–1939. He and his wife
Beatrice had been psychoanalyzed by Earl Zinn, an analyst trained at the Berlin Psychoanalytic
Institute. (B. Whiting [2001] describes the influence of psychoanalytic training and analysis on
in her work in an article, “Freud in the Field.”) The theory as it affected child rearing had been
developed by other Yale mentors of Whiting, including Neal Miller and John Dollard, whose
1941 volume Social Learning and Imitation was an important influence on him.
I shall resist the temptation to fully explicate the theoretical model that Whiting and his col-
leagues assembled from behavior theory, psychoanalysis, and functionalism because in the end
it turned out to be only partly relevant to the empirical work of the SCSS. It is discussed in detail
in several other articles in this special issue. The project’s open-ended methods of ethnography
and naturalistic observation of child behavior produced findings that were fruitfully analyzed
from several perspectives, thus leading to a loosening of the ties of the SCSS to the Yale Institute
model of personality based on secondary drive theory and a strict theory first approach to sci-
ence. Moreover, to anticipate a conclusion of this article, it was the ethnography and naturalistic
observations that in my opinion constituted the greatest long-term contribution of the SCSS.
Yet it is important to recognize that Whiting and others involved with the SCSS were theoreti-
cally sophisticated psychologists and anthropologists. They believed that empirical work should
be harnessed to hypothesis-testing ends, even while embarking on a project in which most time
would be taken up with ethnographic and observational tasks oriented more to discovery and
inductive generalization than to confirmation or falsification of theoretical predictions. This poten-
tial tension was not recognized in the Field Manual or the Field Guide (J. W. M. Whiting et al.,
1966) that served as the plan of action for the SCSS; it would only become apparent later. Thus,
the Six Cultures Study had roots in the rich theorizing about learning, psychodynamics, and
culture at Yale in the 1930s. However, the project proved less bound to the Yale paradigm than
was the Whiting and Child book that preceded it or such famous articles as “Sorcery, Sin, and the
Superego” (J. W. M. Whiting, 1994b).
On the methodological side, the SCSS strongly reflected the influence of the Whitings’ years
at Yale. The Whitings had been key participants in the thinking that contributed to the ethno-
graphic data archive, later known as the Human Relations Area Files, founded at Yale University
in 1941 and still located in New Haven, Connecticut, and its encyclopedic classification system,
the Outline of Cultural Materials, coauthored by John Whiting (Murdock et al., 1938). Indeed,
using worldwide ethnographic data for generalizing about human behavior, a project initiated at
Yale by William Graham Sumner early in the 20th century, was a personal cause for John Whiting.
He also saw the SCSS (as well as the Human Relations Area Files and the Society for Cross-
Cultural Research, which he helped found in 1971) as means of enhancing general knowledge
through comparable ethnography. Furthermore, as a protégé of the Yale sociologist–psychologist
John Dollard, Whiting considered the “community study,” then practiced by sociologists (Arensberg,
1954) as well as anthropologists, as the right way to capture the local environment of the child.
Whiting used the community study approach to solve the problem of whether a particular
sample of parents and children studied in the SCSS was representative of the wider ethnic group
or nation in which it was embedded. The solution was the PSU (primary sampling unit in the
Field Manual, primary social unit in the Field Guide), which referred to the local community in
which field work was carried out, making it clear that all ethnographic descriptions referred to
that local community rather than to the larger ethnic or national population. In this manner, the
advantages of face-to-face ethnographic work could be preserved without speculatively extrapo-
lating its descriptions to a larger social entity. The Whitings were always careful to limit their
discussion of findings to the PSU and not generalize them to the surrounding society in the way
that some other anthropologists were prone to do in speaking to public audiences. The choice of

Downloaded from jcc.sagepub.com at PONTIFICIA UNIV CATOLICA on June 11, 2013

516 Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 41(4)

participant observation in a local community as the primary tool of field work on socialization
reflects a convergence of Yale influences, including Malinowski, Dollard, anthropological and
sociological community studies, and cross-cultural data in context.
One further part of the background to the SCSS was the Harvard Values Project of Clyde and
Florence Kluckhohn and their collaborators (Kluckhohn & Strodtbeck, 1961; Vogt & Albert,
1966). On his arrival at Harvard in 1949, John Whiting participated in this project with his stu-
dents Eleanor Hollenberg Chasdi, Helen Faigin Antonovsky, and Barbara Chartier Ayres, who
conducted field work on the socialization of the child (the learning of values) among Zuni,
Mormons, and Texans in Ramah, New Mexico. For Whiting, this was something of a rehearsal
for the larger and longer project soon to come, particularly as it involved the testing of hypoth-
eses through individual differences at the “intracultural” level. It also represents another
intellectual influence, that of Kluckhohn’s concept of cultural values, on the thinking that went
into the SCSS. The Whiting team’s involvement in the People of Rimrock project led to the
publication of the article “The Learning of Values” (J. W. M. Whiting, Chasdi, Antonovsky, &
Ayres, 1966/1994), in which they laid out a theory of socialization:

Certain aspects of the child-rearing process seem to have the effect of, if not creating, at
least strengthening values far beyond the conscious intent of the agents of socialization.
(p. 135)

At every step in the planning process, the SCSS was a collaborative project. It involved the
formal research community of the SSRC, the less formal network of Yale-trained psychologists
and Harvard-based anthropologists in the culture and personality field as well as a group of
investigators and field workers who argued with one another and finally agreed on how to conduct
the investigation. John Whiting (1994a) has described in detail his commitment to research
collaboration, and it is worth emphasizing here that the SCSS was viewed by its participants as
a project launched on behalf of a scientific research community.

The Field Project, 1954–1957

Once the grant had been made, the principal investigators assembled field teams, mostly hus-
bands and wives, for the data collection. Kim and Romaine Romney and John and Ann Fischer
from Harvard were assigned to work in Mexico and New England, respectively. Thomas and
Hatsumi Maretzki from Yale worked in Okinawa, and William and Corinne Nydegger and Leigh
Minturn from Cornell worked in the Philippines and India, respectively. The majority were
chosen as anthropologists (postdoctoral or predoctoral) who had either carried out field work in
these places or at least had some prior knowledge of the language and culture. In the case of
psychologist Leigh Minturn, her field work in India was to be carried out in the village where
there had been a Cornell project for some years. In addition, Beatrice B. Whiting at Harvard was
appointed as the coordinator for the field studies, and I was appointed her part-time research
assistant.
An SSRC Summer Conference to plan the field work was held in June and July 1954 at
Palfrey House, then the location of the Laboratory of Human Development (John Whiting, direc-
tor) of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The field teams worked together with the
principal investigators, Beatrice Whiting, and expert advisors to put finishing touches on the
“Field Guide for a Study of Socialization,” which acted as the manual for data collection among
participants in the project. The Field Guide was later published (J. W. M. Whiting et al., 1966) in
a version edited by Beatrice Whiting with retrospective comments by her and the field teams and
a preface by John Whiting. Much of the thinking that went into the project is in that version,

Downloaded from jcc.sagepub.com at PONTIFICIA UNIV CATOLICA on June 11, 2013

LeVine 517

which (though long out of print) is an invaluable source for a future intellectual history of the
project. Its frank and self-critical evaluations of the project not only are revealing of method-
ological decisions and failures but also testify to the nondefensive transparency that characterized
the Whitings’ style of conducting research.
In this article, I want to emphasize a few points from my own memory of that 1954 confer-
ence. First, by bringing in child psychologists such as Alfred Baldwin, Robert R. Sears, Herbert
Wright, and Eleanor E. Maccoby and the anthropologists George Peter Murdock and David F.
Aberle to help plan the project, the Whitings and their collaborators were lending substance to
the status of the SCSS. The project represented the common interest of the social sciences in the
collection of cross-cultural data on socialization—a uniquely interdisciplinary move, then or
later. (Eleanor Maccoby, who was on the research staff of the laboratory, continued to participate
in helping to develop observational methods.) Second, the advice of these outside consultants
was taken seriously, as exemplified by the use of Wright’s concept of behavior settings, from his
ecological research in the United States (Barker & Wright, 1954) for the analysis of the project’s
naturalistic observations (B. B. Whiting & Whiting, 1975). Third, the planning conference could
not, and did not, resolve the tensions between the demands for comparable data with open-ended
ethnographic and observational approaches, but the Whitings remained committed to both.
The field work was carried out during the academic year 1954–1955. Communication between
Beatrice Whiting and the field teams, with which I assisted her, was hampered by the slow pace
of mail between Harvard and the far-flung field sites. I remember particularly their complaints
about the arduous demands of the naturalistic observations and about the difficulties of using
some of the instruments designed for interviewing children. By the spring of 1955, I was awarded
support from the Foreign Area Fellowship Program of the Ford Foundation to conduct a study
replicating the project’s field work in an East African community, but for over a 2-year period
instead of the 1 year of the larger project. (It was already evident that a year of field work was
too short; see J. W. M. Whiting et al., 1966, p. 5). My wife Barbara (later Barbara Lloyd) and
I arrived in Uganda, where we intended to work, in October 1955, but ultimately decided to work
with the Gusii people of southwestern Kenya, where we spent some 20 months conducting field
work and collecting data according to the Field Guide. After we returned in 1957, the Whitings
decided to include our Gusii data and publications in the larger project, which became the “Six
Cultures Study.”

Analyzing Data and Publishing Findings, 1957–1975

After the field work was completed, Beatrice Whiting assumed the central role in the analysis
and publication of the data. Leigh Minturn and William Lambert at Cornell published a book on
their analysis of the mother interviews from all six cultures (Minturn & Lambert, 1964). Irvin
Child (with Herbert H. Barry III and Margaret K. Bacon) at Yale also published cross-cultural
studies from the ethnographic literature designed to supplement the SCSS findings (e.g., Barry,
Bacon, & Child, 1957; Barry, Child, & Bacon, 1959), but the largest responsibility was carried by
Beatrice Whiting. She edited the ethnographic accounts, which were published together in 1963
as Six Cultures: Studies of Child Rearing, a volume of more than 1,000 pages, and then were
published separately in 1966 as six monographs plus the Field Guide. Once the first volume was
in press, she turned her attention to the naturalistic observations of children.
These observations assumed greater importance after it became clear that the other measures of
child behavior mandated by the Field Guide (the child interview and the child Thematic Apper-
ception Test [TAT]) had yielded incomplete or inadequate data. Yet analyzing the observational
data presented a great challenge. The corpus of data was large, with 136 children aged 3 to 11,
each of whom had been observed in action for 5 minutes on at least 15 occasions, meaning that

Downloaded from jcc.sagepub.com at PONTIFICIA UNIV CATOLICA on June 11, 2013

518 Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 41(4)

there were more than 2,040 observation periods covering more than 10,000 minutes. Coding
categories for actions and interactions had to be developed, along with methods for analyzing
this kind of data quantitatively. As the Whitings said in the preface to Children of Six Cultures,
“At times, the data seemed insurmountable” (B. B. Whiting & Whiting, 1975, p. x). It was only
when high-speed computers became available in the 1960s—or more accurately, when one high-
speed computer became available to social scientists at Harvard, and when the Whitings gained
the help of a graduate student (Richard Longabaugh) who knew how to program it—that it
became possible for them to solve the problems of analyzing the SCSS observational data. This
is certainly one of the reasons why the final report on child behavior in the six samples took some
17 years to produce. At the beginning in the late 1950s, the means for analyzing the observational
data did not exist. After the means became available, many of the original hypotheses had to be
rethought and new ones devised.
The historical context of the years 1957 to 1975 calls attention to other reasons for the delay
in completing the project. This was a period of unprecedented growth of American universities,
of the social science disciplines, and of support for social and psychological research. The growth
was accompanied by an upheaval in theory as well as methods. Hull’s ideas concerning a general
theory of behavior underwent a decline, and the “cognitive revolution” in psychology was initi-
ated by Jerome Bruner, George Miller, and Noam Chomsky in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The
field of child development began to take new shape in terms derived less from habit-formation
experiments (“learning theory”) than from a combination of laboratory and observational studies
of human children—now increasingly inspired by Jean Piaget’s concepts of cognitive develop-
ment. The field was also being influenced by ethological research on imprinting in animals and
by Lev Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory, which was beginning to become known in the United
States. Psychoanalytic views of child development, which had influenced the formulations
concerning dependency and aggression by Sears, Whiting, and Child, were being eclipsed by
policy-oriented concerns about the cognitive development and academic performance of chil-
dren in American schools.
The Whitings were aware of these currents, but they did not abandon their theoretical view-
point. John Whiting’s work on the cultural psychodynamics of male identity during this period
makes that clear (see the article by Lee Munroe, this issue). They did, however, shift the focus
of SCSS analyses from the effects of child rearing on unconscious processes of personality
development to more sociological topics, such as how household structure affects the overt
behavior of children (B. B. Whiting & Whiting, 1975). In my view, this shift also reflected the
Whitings’ response to problems with the Six Cultures data; the child interview and projective
test, designed to measure the effects of child rearing, had, as mentioned above, yielded incom-
plete and inadequate data (confer J. W. M. Whiting et al., 1966, pp. 118-128). Although the
mother interview, designed to measure child rearing determinants, had yielded complete data
for all six samples, the validity of data from retrospective interviews came under devastating
empirical critique in the psychological literature after the field work had been conducted. This
was recognized by Beatrice Whiting in her comments in the published Field Guide:

Although an attempt was made in the interview to focus upon current practices, some of the
questions were retrospective, particularly those . . . where the age at which a practice was
begun was in question. . . . Such retrospective reports are highly unreliable even in a culture
such as ours with clocks, calendars and a preoccupation with time. (J. W. M. Whiting et al.,
1966, p. 90)

Beatrice Whiting mentions studies published in 1960 and 1961 demonstrating the inaccuracy
of retrospection, but an even more sweeping censure of maternal interviews came a few years

Downloaded from jcc.sagepub.com at PONTIFICIA UNIV CATOLICA on June 11, 2013

LeVine 519

later from the research of Marian Radke Yarrow and her colleagues at the National Institute of
Mental Health (Yarrow, Campbell, & Burton, 1964, 1968). The findings from the Yarrow study,
casting doubt on the reliability and validity of mothers’ reports of their child-rearing practices,
could not be ignored by the Whitings. These findings resulted from a carefully executed study
of 86 mothers of preschool children, carried out by the respected child psychologist Marian
Yarrow working with Roger V. Burton, who had been a student and collaborator of John Whiting.
Its interview was modeled on the Sears, Maccoby, and Levin (1957) study of Boston mothers,
which had also served as the model for the Six Cultures mother interview. A large majority of
the mothers studied (74%) had been to college, so this was an educationally advanced sample
of women who might have been expected to have more ability to notice and remember their own
behavior than mothers with less education in the United States or elsewhere. Yet their responses
were inconsistent with each other over time and with other data. The conclusions of Yarrow et al.
(1968) amounted to a wholesale rejection of the retrospective interview approach to investigating
child rearing and its effects, on which a major part of the SCSS had been based (i.e., the app­
roach taken in the studies of Robert R. Sears and his colleagues in Iowa and Boston). Without
dependable measures of either maternal inputs or child outcomes, many of the “antecedent-
consequent” hypotheses envisioned in the Field Guide could not be tested.
However, the observational data collected in the SCSS proved interesting and useful in other
ways. The analysis of these data was presented in Children of Six Cultures: A Psycho-Cultural
Analysis and focused on how features such as “the economy, social structure, settlement pattern,
and household and family organization . . . determine the learning environments in which chil-
dren are brought up, thus influencing their behavior” (B. B. Whiting & Whiting, 1975, p. 66).
This rethinking of the meaning of their data represented the Whitings’ resilience in facing the
virtual impossibility of achieving some of the project’s original goals. Confronted with difficul-
ties in measuring maternal practices and child personality outcomes, they turned to the two
sources of unchallenged strength in the SCSS, the ethnographic data and naturalistic observa-
tions of child behavior.

Contributions of the Six Culture Study

In this article, I do not attempt to review the substantive contributions of the Six Cultures study
to our knowledge of child rearing and development in the human species. Many people conduct-
ing cross-cultural research on child rearing today were inspired by the project’s publications to
embark on their own research into cultural variations in childhood environments and develop-
ment (e.g., see LeVine & New, 2008). That testifies to the long-term impact of the project. By
launching such an ambitious project and producing a body of findings, the Whitings and their
colleagues called attention to cultural variability in childhood and did so with an unprecedented
intensity and rigor that was needed in the third quarter of the 20th century. As the child develop-
ment field expanded during the 1960s and 1970s, it tended to regress to the monocultural
perspective of days long past, when psychologists naively saw American children as representa-
tives of a universal humanity and took no account of the rest of the world. (Margaret Mead and
John Whiting had made progress, prior to 1960, in convincing psychologists of the importance
of cultural diversity to their generalizations, but their influence was swept aside by the universal-
ist tide that rose during the 1960s and has only begun to ebb since 1990.) The Six Cultures Study
stood out as a beacon of cross-cultural illumination and insight in a field that was looking inward.
Without it, the building of the cultural and cross-cultural psychology of development we have
seen in recent years might have been harder and taken longer.
Publication of the six monographs of the Six Cultures Study made the point that the child-
rearing practices of particular cultural communities are worthy of book-length description, in

Downloaded from jcc.sagepub.com at PONTIFICIA UNIV CATOLICA on June 11, 2013

520 Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 41(4)

quantitative as well as qualitative depth. The six monographs have been followed by many more
monographs on childhood in the anthropological literature that followed (LeVine, 2007). If the
ethnography of childhood has improved since the 1960s, the field nevertheless owes much to
the ethnographies of that period.
The naturalistic observations of the SCSS represented its most innovative contribution, a
departure from the previous work on non-Western child rearing that tended toward generalized
ethnographic descriptions supplemented by illustrative anecdotes. Once the observations were
coded, aggregated, and cross-classified by social and cultural variables, it was possible to generate
frequency distributions that could shed light on many problems, particularly those of how structural
factors and cultural practices affected observable patterns of child behavior. The B. B. Whiting and
Edwards (1988) book Children of Different Worlds: The Formation of Social Behavior, which
includes the SCSS observations along with those from another eight societies, along with spot
observation data collected under the leadership of Ruth and Lee Munroe, shows how the natural-
istic methodology and its data could enable cross-cultural researchers to tackle other problems
(e.g., gender differences) with fundamental developmental implications. This remains our most
promising methodological approach, hindered in its further worldwide application mainly by the
onerous demands of the field observation method itself. Perhaps new video technology will miti-
gate this problem and realize the potentials for a cross-cultural science of child development that
the Six Cultures Study began to unleash more than 50 years ago.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interests with respect to the authorship and/or publication of
this article.

Financial Disclosure/Funding
The author received no financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article.

References
Arensberg, C. M. (1954). The community-study method. American Journal of Sociology, 60(2), 109-124.
Barker, R. E., & Wright, H. P. (1954). Midwest and its children. Evanston, IL: Row, Peterson.
Barry, H., III, Bacon, M. K., & Child, I. L. (1957). A cross-cultural survey of some sex differences in social-
ization. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 55, 327-332.
Barry, H., III, Child, I. L., & Bacon, M. K. (1959). Relation of child training to subsistence economy.
American Anthropologist, 61, 51-63.
Kluckhohn, F. R., & Strodtbeck, F. L. (1961). Variations in value orientations. Westport, CO: Greenwood.
LeVine, R. A. (2007). Ethnographic studies of childhood: A historical overview. American Anthropologist,
109, 247-260.
LeVine, R. A., & New, R. S. (Eds.). (2008). Anthropology and child development: A cross-cultural reader.
Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Miller, N. E., & J. Dollard (1941). Social learning and imitation. New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press.
Minturn, L., & Lambert, W. W. (1964). Mother of six cultures: Antecedents of child rearing. New York:
John Wiley.
Munroe, R.J. (2010). Following the Whitings: The study of male pregnancy symptoms. Journal of Cross-
Cultural Psychology. 41(1), 592-604.
Murdock, G. P., Ford, C. S., Hudson, A. E., Kennedy, R., Simmons, L. W., & Whiting, J. W. M. (1938).
Outline of cultural materials. New Haven, CT: Yale University, Institute of Human Relations, Cross-
Cultural Survey.
Sears, R. R., Maccoby, E. E., & Levin, H. (1957). Patterns of child rearing. Evanston, IL: Row, Peterson.

Downloaded from jcc.sagepub.com at PONTIFICIA UNIV CATOLICA on June 11, 2013

LeVine 521

Vogt, E. Z., & Albert, E. H. (Eds.). (1966). People of Rimrock: A study in five cultures. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Whiting, B. B. (Ed.). (1963). Six cultures: Studies of child rearing. New York: John Wiley.
Whiting, B. B. (2001). Freud in the field. Ethos, 29, 247-258.
Whiting, B. B., & Edwards, C. P. (1988). Children of different worlds: The formation of social behavior.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Whiting, B. B., & Whiting, J. W. M. (1975). Children of six cultures: A psycho-cultural analysis. Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Whiting, J. W. M. (1994a). Fifty years as a behavioral scientist: Autobiographical notes. In E. H. Chasdi
(Ed.), Culture and human Development: The selected papers of John Whiting (pp. 14-44). New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Whiting, J. W. M. (1994b). Sorcery, sin, and the superego: A cross-cultural study of some mechanisms of
social control. In E. H. Chasdi (Ed.), Culture and human development: The selected papers of John
Whiting (pp. 175-194). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Whiting, J. W. M., Chasdi, E. H., Antonovsky, H. F., & Ayres, B. (1994). The learning of values. In E. H. Chasdi
(Ed.), Culture and human development: The selected papers of John Whiting (pp. 135-172). New York:
Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1966)
Whiting, J. W. M., & Child, I. L. (1953). Child training and personality: A cross-cultural study. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Whiting, J. W. M., Child, I. L., Lambert, W. W., Fischer, A. M., Fischer, J. L., Nydegger, C., et al. (1966).
Field guide for a study of socialization. New York: John Wiley.
Whiting, J. W. M., et al. Ayres, B. C., Geertz, H., Goethals, G. W., Holzinger, C., Lowell, E., Maccoby, E. E.,
Romney, A. K., Salisbury, R., Steward, W., & Thibaut, J. W. (1953). Field manual for the cross-
cultural study of child rearing. New York: Social Science Research Council.
Yarrow, M. R., Campbell, J. D., & Burton, R. V. (1964). Reliability of maternal retrospection: A preliminary
report. Family Process, 3, 207-218.
Yarrow, M. R., Campbell, J. D., & Burton, R. V. (1968). Child rearing: An inquiry into research and meth-
ods. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Bio
Robert A. LeVine is Roy E. Larsen Professor of Education and Human Development, Emeritus, at Harvard
University. His most recent publications include Anthropology and Child Development: A Cross-Cultural
Reader (with R. S. New; 2008), Childhood Socialization: Comparative Studies of Parenting, Learning and
Educational Change (2003), and Japanese Frames of Mind: Cultural Perspectives on Human Development
(with H. Shimizu; 2001). His new book, Psychological Anthropology: A Reader on Self and Culture, will
be published in 2010.

Downloaded from jcc.sagepub.com at PONTIFICIA UNIV CATOLICA on June 11, 2013