A landscape approach to understanding child identity development in violent contexts

Vanderbilt University, Nashville TN

Investigators

Abstract

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.