Some culture is hiding in plain sight in research on child development

Abstract

Child development is cultural in nature, yet a divide persists between a (cross-)cultural developmental science niche alongside a seemingly a-cultural mainstream. In particular, childhood research relying on convenience sampling in often Western, post-industrial (i.e., WEIRD) societies rarely ventures into issues of culture and context, promoting excessive overgeneralization and false assumptions of what is considered ‘typical’ in child development. This article has two aims: First, it illustrates the cultural make-up of the communities traditionally overrepresented yet often unmarked in developmental science, while highlighting important variations within this cluster. Second, it demonstrates how this cultural make-up, in turn, is key to the methods employed, the findings produced and the theories postulated in developmental science. Regardless of where it is conducted, developmental science is a cultural endeavour and thus needs to grapple with its cultural foundations.