My research concerns how children adapt to environmental, especially, sociocultural challenges. We know little about the development of children in developing countries—the majority of the world’s children. To help address this urgent need, I have investigated these main research questions:

						Saint Vincent Mother and Child

					Masten and Coatsworth (1995) have defined child competence as effective performance in developmental tasks as judged in ecological and cultural context. As I have proposed, competence is the critical intersection between child development studies and cultural-community studies (Durbrow, 1999). Each setting has appropriate standards for judging performance or what I call criteria of competence. I discussed this in a chapter for the Minnesota Symposium on Child Psychology and used my field studies in the Caribbean to illustrate how these criteria shape children and how these criteria, in turn, are shaped by larger cultural forces. Together with Ann Masten, Auke Tellegren, and others, I developed interview and analysis methods to identify these criteria in diverse settings. In a paper for the International Journal of Behavioral Development and in several international meetings, we compared criteria of competence in three settings of poverty, a Filipino village, a U.S. homeless shelter consisting of African-American families, and a poor Caribbean village. Two lessons, among many, stand out in our study. First, criteria of competence seem similar--but not identical--to the criteria psychologists use to assess children’s adjustment. Second, among families in the homeless shelter and the Caribbean village, parents have great difficulty identifying competent adolescent boys in their settings, which suggest that competent teen boys are less visible. This study has been important in reminding social workers and psychologists about the problems of local versus psychological assessment (or emic versus etic). The next step will examine how criteria of competence in the Caribbean changes with community development. Transcription of many hours of parent interviews have been completed; I am now coding interviews for a paper for the journal Childhood and an ethnography. This paper will describe relations between community changes and changes in parental perceptions about children.

						Saint Vincent child

					In my second study our aim has been to examine how Caribbean schoolchildren have responded to early challenges (e.g., malnutrition) and concurrent challenges (e.g., chronic poverty, community change) in regard to three competencies considered important by adults: learning, peer relations, and rule-abiding behavior. My collaborators include Drs Barbara Schaefer (Penn State), Shane Jimerson (UC Santa Barbara), David Wagstaff (Penn State), and many graduate students. Every summer since 1994, my students and I have assessed village children as well as, uniquely, sociocultural changes in their environment. Lately we have published on factors that influence academic competence. For example, we found that our measure of cognitive ability was far less predictive of academic change than attentional and anxiety problems. This finding is important because it suggests that rural children’s learning disadvantages may be significantly improved by reducing attention and anxiety problems. We have also investigating home factors on academic competence and will soon be examining risk factors and protective factors involved in peer and conduct competencies. To our knowledge this is one of only three prospective studies of children in a developing community yet undertaken and it is the only one with yearly assessments and observations which allows us to examine the relation between community change (e.g., electrification) and child behavioral change (e.g., play patterns).