You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Research concerning psychological development during infancy has proceeded so rapidly during the past decade that this report of the Harvard-connected Day Care Project, begun in 1968 and discontinued several years later, might well have been outdated by now. To the contrary, however, some of the findings of this project provoke a rethinking of current views of early development, particularly since they were unexpected in part. Furthermore, they tend to support certain psychoanalytically based theoretical ideas, in spite of the fact that the authors tend to view development primarily from a cognitive standpoint.
The study was planned to clarify two major issues: first, can one predict from the psychological profile of a one-year-old the more complex psychological profile several years later; second, what effect does regular day care center attendance have on the development of infants compared to those infants reared entirely at home. Both issues are extremely complex ones, and the variables which have to be considered are discussed at great length and most lucidly by Kagan in the chapters that constitute almost the first two thirds of the book. (Incidentally, an excellent review of pertinent literature is included in this portion.)
One example of the complexity of the research issues is the question of what actually constitutes psychological development; this is determined at least in part by the cultural and professional biases of the particular researchers, as Kagan indicates. In this project, one index of psychological development was the degree of separation anxiety and when it appeared. Another index was the infant's degree of attentiveness, vocalization, and smiling in response to visual and auditory stimuli or events. Analysis of the research data appeared to confirm Kagan's (1971) earlier research findings that there are major discontinuities in these particular dimensions of psychological development.
The research design consisted of a group of 33 infa