In addition to the research von Suchodoletz is conducting in the UAE, she has also worked in various other countries, including Germany, Finland, Kosovo, Ukraine, India, and Jordan, while Waters has conducted research in Europe and China. Both are doing comparative work that seeks to determine similarities and differences in child-caregiver relationships across cultures.
Though there is much to gain by analyzing these early-childhood experiences in different parts of the globe, there are obstacles as well.
“If you want to include different cultures in one study, you are challenged by using exactly the same measures across cultures,” von Suchodoletz said.
Most measurements that are common in the discipline have been developed based on Western theories, she explained, and these measurements might not accurately reflect what is happening in non-Western cultural contexts. “So in drawing any conclusions about cross-cultural similarities or differences, one has to be very careful about what measures are being used and how the results are interpreted,” von Suchodoletz said.
That being said, conducting these studies in different cultures allows researchers to ask questions that they wouldn’t be able to otherwise, as this kind of research “helps us disentangle what is universal and what is context specific related to learning and development,” she noted.
For Waters’ project in China, he and collaborators from NYU New York and NYU Shanghai are studying the relationships between over 200 children and their mothers. In this investigation, they hope to learn how the manner in which mothers play with their children can predict the level of attachment years from now.
“My goal with my research in China is not to show that all parents behave the same way, but rather that the developmental process by which a child learns to trust, or not trust, their caregiver according to the way the caregiver treats them is culturally universal,” Waters said.