A Day in the Life: secure interludes with joint book reading.

Abstract. A Day in the Life is an interdisciplinary study of thriving 2-year-old girls and their families in diverse communities around the globe. We understand development to be active participation in cultural systems of practice, and examine children's interactions with their caregivers, other companions, and the environment. We focus upon children engaged in their everyday activities, attending to the patternings of local interactions that constitute cultural activity, as well as inter-articulations between the values and understandings shaped and reshaped in the day with those formed in dialogue among research participants. A crucial element of the project is the full participation by local investigators. Our core methodology films a day in the life of each child, tracking the child through her landscape. We have observed nurturant interactions in all settings where we collected our data: Thailand, Canada, Italy, the United Kingdom (UK), Peru, the United States (USA), and Turkey. Likewise, we have separately examined the various joint book-reading experiences of the children in those settings. In this article, we observe the bidirectional place of affect in joint book-reading episodes of children with different adult partners, and inspect the potential for such emergent literate activities to contribute to strong affective relationships between the children and family members.

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This research that explores a day in the life of 30-month-old children in seven locations around the globe (Thailand, Canada, Italy, UK, Peru, USA, and Turkey) affords an occasion to reflect on certain aspects of our models of child development, and especially to emphasize consideration of cultural issues arising from it. As Tudge (2008) suggested, we still need to formulate a theory of child development that integrates culture and its multidimensional influences at all levels of the systems, and to move from sociocultural perspectives to a culturally relevant theory of human development. We are not interested here in comparing one culture to another, nor to test the universality of models or the generalizability of findings across cultures. Our Day in the Life research is conducted with the assumption "that culture and psychology are mutually constitutive phenomena which cannot be reduced to each other" (Garcia Coll, Akerman, & Cicchetti, 2000, p. 347).

Our Day in the Life Methodology Local investigators in the seven communities around the globe obtained their own institutional ethics approval in the event that the one obtained for a major umbrella project (1) was inappropriate to local conditions. The local investigators in each community, where they were personally and professionally qualified to seek out thriving children, first recruited children who were approximately 2 1/2 years old. We chose to work with girls, as they represent a somewhat understudied population. We initially recruited them as "strong children," but the local investigators translated into local perceptions of very young children who were doing very well physically and emotionally and whose parents would actively welcome us into their families for one full day of videotaping. We did not focus on the caregivers and assured them that, as we were looking for roots of strength in their children, we were not searching for challenges in their lives. We asked that they allow us to audiovisually record them on one usual day when the family was at home. A detailed description of the methodology is provided in Gillen, Cameron, Tapanya, Pinto, Hancock, Young, and Accorti Gamannossi (2007).

In brief, after the children and parents were recruited, we visited the home and queried the adults who were present for demographic information, and we asked questions about their childrearing attitudes and experiences. We turned on the camera for approximately an hour to help the families become accustomed to having a camera running and to having a second researcher present taking notes. Next, we visited each home for as much of a whole day as the parents would welcome; we filmed the entire time, excluding nap time and times when toileting and other private interchanges occurred. We told the caregivers that they could also ask for the camera to be shut off, but they did not avail themselves of that option. The film taker would sometimes exchange roles with the field note taker to achieve a perspectival break; in some locations, however, the two roles were kept separate from the beginning to the end of the day. The note taker also drew plans of the surroundings to help distal investigators visualize the contexts more fully. Both the field notes and the maps/plans are invaluable in understanding the film footage. The time-keyed field notes recorded all those on the scene at any particular point in the day, the relationships of those individuals to the child, and any anomalies or localisms expected to be noted by colleagues at a later date as needing an explanation. These field notes were translated into English for all investigators to work with; ultimately, all interactions were transcribed and translated into English by the local investigators.

Next, two distal investigators independently viewed the tapes of the day in concert with the field notes and maps and created a list of nominations of brief segments (approximately five minutes) of the child's day that seemed noteworthy, either in terms of further inspection or at least in the sense that it generated questions in the researcher's mind, or that it potentially seemed exemplary of some aspect of the child's day. These selections included the child's interactions with salient material artifacts and people in the context, when possible. Those researchers then discussed the nominations and achieved consensus on the most important selections to be made for a one half-hour compilation of approximately six five-minute segments that represented the day from their consensual point of view. The local investigators then returned to the family with the compilation tape and viewed it with the family, including the child. This second session also was videotaped and members of the family commented upon each video segment. The compilation was given to the family as a memento of the day for them to keep. They were also queried on their histories as children and how that history might relate to their current childrearing attitudes and practices, especially when reflecting on the child's day.

Our colleagues around the globe engaged in the data collection in each context and these local colleagues serve as advisers on interpretating the interactions between the children and their families, but they do much more as well. They help us to contextualize the families, their family practices, the artifacts with which the children interact, the symbol system practices, the music chosen to play with and for the children, the media in the home, the nature of eating events that are enacted during the day, and the activities chosen for the child to participate in on the day of the DITL, and whether they might reflect cultural values or more global influences. All of our colleagues are researchers in child development, early years education, or health psychology. They all have been educated in universities in the west, however, so take at least two points of view as they observe the child in her own home environment. The original full-day videos, parental interviews, field notes, and location sketches were copied and shared with the entire team for their analyses. Table 1 summarizes the steps of the methodology.

Collaborations between local and other distal investigators resulted in analyses of the following themes, which emerged as the various investigators became familiar with the materials from all locations:

1. The families' uses of mealtimes and other times during the day identified as "eating events" as an analogy to "literacy events" (Gillen & Hancock, 2006; Gillen, Accorti Gamannossi, & Hancock, 2008).

2. The role of music in the children's lives, be it music common in the adult lives of their parents, or music more directed to the child's familiar play world (Young & Gillen, 2007).

3. The types of humor in the little girls' lives, most notably that practiced and then shared by the children themselves (Cameron, Kennedy, & Cameron, 2008).

4. Resilience building events and activities, such as swinging, rocking; the gentle pats and hugs the children sustained during the day; and the safe places they constructed for themselves for exploration of their small worlds (Cameron, Tapanya, & Gillen, 2006; Tapanya, Taley-Ongan, & Cameron, 2007).

5. Experiences with symbol systems, such as engaging in joint book reading or graphic representations, such as painting and drawing (Pinto, Accorti Gaman nossi, & Cameron, 2006; Pinto, Accorti Gamannossi, & Cameron, 2008).

The process by which we, as both local and distal investigators, collaborated to shed new light on the DITL data set involved our examining, both separately and together, resilience factors and joint book-reading in the lives of our "strong" young participants. Having already examined in some depth the nurturance experiences and symbol system activities in each of the children's days, we came to recognize these activities as mutually facilitatory. In fact, they frequently coexist.

Goals of the Present Study

We have come together for this present article in a grounded theoretical way and based upon several literatures as we observed that the home emergent literacy activities could either reflect the security of the contexts within which these children were being raised; alternatively, the loving care that seemed, in every case, to frame the children's experiences with joint book-reading could just as easily be seen as building blocks for the development of secure attachments between the children and their caregivers. As all the many instances of joint book-reading have been identified in all the corpora, we have selected for this article incidents from just two families that exemplify the range of interchange styles between children and their family members, and we note the affective quality of the joint attention in each case.

In the past, the emergent literacy field has given scant attention to the qualitative, including affective, aspects (as opposed to the quantitative--frequency--and pedagogical aspects) of the reading interaction between parents and young children (Leseman & de Jong, 1998). More recently, however, it has received some interest (e.g., Sonnenschein & Munsterman, 2002). Through repeated interactions with parents, such as in shared book reading, children can develop mental models of themselves and of their parents. This action influences their expectations, responses, and future interactions, which are essential features of attachment relations. Given the complexity and importance of the parent-child relationship and its associations with other developmental outcomes, the relationship between children's attachment patterns and parent-child shared book reading interactions has begun to receive attention in the discipline.

For instance, a provocative association has been established between joint book reading and attachment styles (Bus & van IJzendoorn, 1988). It seems that securely attached pairs of parents and children have book-reading styles that are affectively stable and warm. Insecure pairs (i.e., parents reading to children who have been classified as either anxiously or ambivalently attached to their mother at the end of their first year of life) are less comfortable in joint tasks of several kinds, and notably in joint book-reading. Meta-analyses confirm this as a recurrent finding (van IJzendoorn, Dijkstra, & Bus, 1995). Furthermore, although there has been some suggestion of a causal connection between attachment and reading style, the directing of the association can be left at this time open to a bidirectional association. It could just as well be the case that comfortable reading to a child could contribute to a strong affective bond, as a strong attachment relationship is a precursor of warm book reading between parent-child pairs.

It is not our goal here to posit causal mechanisms, but rather to reexamine several of our previously investigated joint book-reading episodes from the perspective that each of the children in our project was seen as a "strong," resilient child with an array of positive caregivers in the home on the day we filmed her. The interactions over book reading that we have previously documented showed the pairs to vary quite widely in their orientations, but in every case, the children were actively involved, deeply engaged in the process, often returning for more book reading at the end of the session. While we had interpreted this high degree of engagement as boding well for a confident engagement in the development of symbol systems in due course, we will now examine the interactions as sources for positive affective engagement that could very likely contribute to building a history of the sort of relations seen by many developmental researchers as sources of secure attachment.

Thus, the processes of joint book reading and affective development can be seen as iterative, mutually scaffolding, especially when the agendas of both parties work in mutual synchrony. The caregivers we observed were very skilled at adapting their agendas to that of their developing charges, and likewise, the children accommodated responsively the engagement challenges before them. It is interesting to us that although the book reading appeared obviously to have had many potentially positive cognitive goals, from the lens of resiliency research, the outcome in terms of positive affective contributions to development might have not been so explicitly in the minds of the caregivers, as they chose to set aside time to share stories and other print with the children.

Our DITL Corpora

Italy

In Italy, the little girl, who was 27 months of age when observed, lived with her mother, a police officer, and father, a municipal employee, in a small, urban flat where there was an abundance of toys, books, and musical activities available. She appeared comfortable in the care of either parent, spending a substantial amount of time in the company of her father early in the day of our observations. Later in the day, both parents were engaged with the child. There were two book-reading sessions of 10 and 15 minutes during the day. Our observation of the child in joint engagement in book reading with her father during the second, longer, session occurred toward the end of the day. The child chose a comic book Amore amore (Love love) by Mordillo from a bookcase and joined her father on a sofa to look at it. Here the father asks his daughter the names of the objects in the pictures:

[00:01:26] Dad: "What is this? This is a ..." (pointing to a picture in the book).

Girl: "A horse!"

Dad: "A horse."

And she reciprocates, asking him the names of the things she doesn't know:

[00:01:40] Girl: "What is this?" (pointing to a picture in the book).

Dad: "This is a palm."

Girl: "A palm" (pointing to the picture).

The communicative partners are comfortably symmetrical in their exchanges when they commence their reading; however, the father is more knowledgeable, so under the circumstance of this collaboration, he is easily in a position to correct the girl's mistakes and teaches her standard pronunciations of words:

[00:02:36] Dad: "What is this?" (pointing to a picture in the book).

Girl: "A ciuf ciuf!"

Dad: "How do you call it? This is a ..."

Girl: "A ciuf ciuf!"

Dad: "No, it is a tr ..."

Girl: "Train!"

Dad: "The train."

It is simple for them to establish an easy interchange that is warm and supportive. Mother enters the picture and engages briefly by asking what they are doing and, registering a note of affectively positive approval:

[00:06:41] Mum (from the kitchen): "What are you doing?"

Dad: "We are reading a book!"

Girl: "We are reading a book!" (looking at the book's cover).

Mum (entering the room): "How nice!"

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

During the exchange, the partners sit very close to each other and look to each other during their verbal interchanges. Both are deeply involved in the shared book reading, and the interaction is mutually engaging.

The girl takes the book and flips the pages, affording the father an opportunity to encourage her to reflect on her reactions to what she is seeing, and specifically inviting comment and validating her preferences:

[00:08:38] Dad: "What is your favorite picture?"

Girl: "This!" (pointing to a picture in the book).

Dad: "Do you like it? What is in there? A man on a stair and then?"

Girl: "...."

Dad: "Then he opens the window."

The girl stops looking at the pictures and chooses a new book: a storybook for children called "Ciccio porcello" ("Ciccio the pig"), bringing it to her father, who narrates without telling a formal story. He points out figures and characters, providing their names and asking her the meaning of scenes:

[00:13:54] Dad: "Where is Ciccio Porcello here?" (pointing to a picture in the book).

Girl: "Here is Ciccio Porcello and there and there" (pointing to several pictures in the book).

Language: The father's language is often complex, especially when he instructs the girl about new words. The girl's language is quite simple, often repeating words and sentences.

Girl: "This boat ... this boat."

Dad: "This is a gondola!"

Girl: "Boat!"

Dad: "It is a boat called gondola."

Interactional Synchrony: Both partners show reciprocal attunement in the development of the interaction on both emotional and cognitive levels. This high level of father-child participation is highlighted by close physical positioning and maintenance of a shared focus of attention and reciprocal interaction: the father describes scenes, points out figures and objects in pictures, and answers the girl's questions about names of objects in the pictures. The child is active in maintaining engagement; her language is simple and direct.

Girl: "What is this?" (pointing to the picture in the book).

Dad: "This is a person thinking."

Girl: "A person" (pointing to the picture in the book).

Parental Instructional Style: The father's interaction style is directive: He mostly turns the pages and gives instruction to the child about correct word usage. However, he also offers her the opportunity to engage in thinking about her knowledge, as revealed in the text and her relationship with it, including her emotional reactions to it.

Dad: "What is this?"

Girl: "The moon!"

Dad: "And this?"

Girl: "Nano" (mispronunciation for airplane).

Dad: "An airplane."

Girl: "Ciao nano!" (expression girl used during the day to say hello to airplanes in the sky).

Affect: The warm security of the partners in the exchange is notable for the apparent comfort that both appear to derive from the shared experience. Attachment security clearly scaffolds the affective tone of much of the day, including these symbol system interactions. But could these joint book-reading sessions enhance the child's expectations that her surroundings are an affectively safe haven from which to explore her growing world?

Girl: "A bed!"

Dad: "How can you climb that bed? It is very tall."

Girl: "It is my bed."

Dad: "Is it like your bed?"

Girl: "Yes, tall, tall!"

The United States

When observed, the young American girl was 30 months of age--"two and one half' as she self-reported--having just celebrated what she called her "half birthday." Her mother and father are both professors, in psychology and physics, respectively, in a small college in a midwestern community in the United States. There were eight encounters with textual materials, several quite brief, including one in which the girl used a notebook to play "waitress" as she took down orders from "customers" at a pretend restaurant. There were three joint book-reading sessions, one with her father and two with her mother, each lasting approximately 15 minutes. One reading was before her midday nap, and the other two occurred before bedtime.

It is bedtime and the girl is with her father. They are lying side by side on a bed, and the father, in a very relaxed way, is reading a book he has chosen. Although the interchange is casual, there are potential lessons about familial relations embedded in the reading:

(Tape time: 01:24:01)

Father: All right, ready? What's this one?

Child: That's Franklin Goes to School.

Father: Franklin Goes to School. Ready? (Father starts reading the story.)

Father: Franklin was going to school for the very first time.

Child: Time. (Father continues.)

Father: Then he woke his ... (expecting child to answer).

Child: Parents.

Father: What are parents?

Child: Parents.

Father: Who are his parents? Who are they?

Child: The turtles.

Father: The turtles.

Father: Are they his brothers and sisters?

Child: No.

Father: Who are they?

Child: They're Franklin's mother.

Father: Mother, and who else?

Child: His father.

Father: His father and his mother. Is that what parents are?

Child: Yeah.

Father: Is that what parents are?

Child: Yeah.

Father: Yeah.

Language: Father uses the book-reading opportunity to explore the child's understanding of a lexical category--a kinship term--and its boundaries. The girl's comfort in the association and calm assurance of being able to satisfy her father's expectations in the exchanges are demonstrated in the continuation that follows as well, where animal labels and identities are surveyed. The father expands his previous theme by now extending the queries to include an exploration of friendship relations:

Father: Where are his friends?

Child: There's beaver, and the rabbits.

Father: Uh huh, anybody else?

Child: There's the teeny fox.

Father: Uh huh.

Child: And the raccoon.

Father: Uh huh.

Child: The raccoon.

Father: Uh huh.

Child: There's the teeny-weeny raccoon and the big raccoon, there's the, ah, the big.

Father: The big fox?

Child: Yeah.

Father: Yeah, do you see a bear?

Child: Yeah.

Father: And then there's Franklin, right?

Affect: The lessons being learned are associated with powerful socio-emotional themes. Sadness and negative emotions are contemplated and articulated in the safety of a bedtime story reading routine:

Father: Does Franklin look happy or sad?

Child: Sad.

Father: Sad, why is he, why is he sad?

Child: He wants to go home.

Father: Yeah, he doesn't want to go to school, does he?

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Parental Interactional Style: Her father has declared himself to be chiefly interested in her cognitive development at this stage in her life, but in story-sharing mode, this partnership is more than simply instructional, although it certainly is that. It is comfortably focused on developing a joint project of mutual understanding of important issues in the imaginative life of this 30-month-old.

After reading with her father, the girl reads a book she has chosen with her mother. They are sitting on the bed and are both involved in exploring the story: the girl actively turns the pages and comments on the story of the growth of the very large dog storybook character, Clifford.

(Tape time 01:43:45).

Mother: Come, Clifford the small, red ...

Child: Puppy.

Mother: Puppy.

Child: Can I read it on here?

Mother: Yeah. Why don't you come sit with me, please? (inviting her to sit on her lap).

Child: Where.

Mother: Whoa bop!

Child: Boump.

Mother: Boump.

Child: (Delighted giggles; commencing reading together.)

Mother invites the child to get comfortable for the shared reading and sets the stage for whatever is to follow. The child is pleased to comply.

Mother: Clifford the small, red puppy.

Child: The small, red puppy.

Mother: My big, red ... (expecting the child to answer).

Child: Dog.

Mother: Dog, that's right. (Mother continues.)

Child: That's your dog's name?

Mother: That's right, what is Martha's dog's name? I forget, do you know?

Child: It's a pet store.

Mother: She got him from a fancy pet store, that's right, but I don't remember his name. Um, you know what, it's in the other book. What is it? ... Bruno, it's Bruno. I remember, it's Bruno.

In setting the stage for the actual story, Mother has offered the child the opportunity to reflect upon such mental states as her own and her mother's memories of previous story readings and their shared experiences.

Mother continues: His dog had ... (expecting the child to answer).

Child: Puppies.

Mother: Mmm.

Mother: Look at how little he is. Is that Clifford?

Child: Yeah.

Mother: But he's so little. Look, what's he doing?

Child: He fell in the dog food.

Mother: He did, he fell in the dish 'cause it's too big. Where is he?

Child: He's in Daddy's boot.

Mother: That's right, he's in Daddy's boot.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Child: Boof boof.

Mother: Arf arf, that's right. "The next

morning he looked bigger to me."

Child: He's not bigger.

The child appears to feel free to disagree, but mother provides further argumentation that the child accepts as compelling:

Mother: He's not bigger? Look, there he's little and there he's bigger, you don't think? I think he is; I think he's getting bigger. Look, he's not falling into the bowl, is he?

Mother: Now do you think he's getting bigger?

Child: Yeah.

Mother: Yeah, I think so, too. Now look how big he is. Now this doggy's scared, 'cause Clifford's so big.... What's that?

Language: Without dwelling on it, the mother notes an affective state in the dog, and then moves on to query the child's knowledge of heavy equipment. Once labeled, the child notes its function. The mother expands and then inquires as to the antecedent of the emotions.

Child: That's a, a, what's that called?

Mother: It's, it's called a crane.

Child: It's pulling Clifford.

Mother: It's ... is, that's right, it's lifting him up and putting him in the moving truck. Look, he's in the moving truck, isn't he? ... Ah, are they crying?

Child: Yeah.

Mother: Yeah, they're sad.

Child: She wants to go home.

Mother: She, she wants her puppy to come back and be with her.... Now look how big he is. Is he so big?

Child: Yeah.

Mother: Yeah, he's super big.

Affect: Questions are responded to, and little attention is paid to "erroneous" responses to questions posed. The tale of a not-too-scary drama of a super big but very gentle dog is told.

Parental Interactional Style: A safe dialogical haven is created for facing and vanquishing potential fears in the comfort of a parent's warm embrace. Mother appeals to the child's emotional understanding through the possible fears and sadness of a little dog.

Discussion

Joint Book Reading as Socio-Cognitive Events

Our analyses of these days showed significant episodes of shared book reading. We observed social interactions in which child and adult jointly attended to a third object: a book. The partners were acting within a special mode of interpretation of the written text, calling the child's attention not only to the meaning, but also to the peculiar lexicon in which the meaning was embedded. As to the different partners (fathers, mother) we saw engaged in book-shared reading, the 2 1/2-year-old children were skilled at detecting and attuning themselves to adult communicative intentions in various social-communicative contexts.

Shared Book Reading

Embedded in a Day in the Life

There are important commonalities with and differences from much previous bookreading research that has largely focused on the emergent literacy outcomes. On the one hand, we observed the omnipresence of a characteristic setting for shared literacy experiences in the interactions: written materials, shared child-adult attention, dyadic asymmetrical relationships, and reciprocal involvements. On the other hand, there were significant particularities in the exchanges between different adults and the children in the timing, activity length, and interactional styles deployed to enhance the child's meta-knowledge of symbolic systems in interestingly unique ways.

Depth of Analysis of Interactions When Viewed in Ecological Context

We have provided here close case analyses of the interactions of the children with significant interlocutors and have observed a range of interactional styles, from directive to instructional to dialogical, with combinations within these children. The children responded obligingly and provided input to a range of approaches, depending upon their options at the time, the materials available to them, the caregivers' styles, possibly time of day, history of family practices, and their present personal inclinations. In both locations, there were incidents of the child's choosing a book and recruiting an adult to read with her, as well as the adult's choosing a story and his or her determination of the reading focus and format. Children adapted skillfully to variations in the degrees of structure in adult affective styles, and both members of conjoint pairs evidenced cognitive, linguistic, and socio-emotional satisfaction in the interchanges.

Reciprocal Engagement of Cognitive,

Linguistic, and Socio-Emotional Processes

The obvious potentials for joint attention to texts' enhancements of emergent literacy, especially with toddlers (Bus, Belsky, van IJzendoorn, & Crnic, 1997), seem almost to eclipse their roles in socio-emotional learning. Once we inspected the transcriptions and footage of the representative interactions of the children in relationship with print materials in committed conjoint attention with a trusted family member, the importance of the relationship between interactional partners became as obvious as either or both relationships with the target materials. The interactional synchrony achieved in every case is reminiscent of the synchrony that Stern (1977), Kaye (1982), and Trevarthen (1995) have described between neonates at the breast and their nursing mothers as integrated and reciprocal collaborations between the infant and the caregiver.

Active Reciprocal Engagement

The toddlers we observed were comfortably situated vis-a-vis their books and their book-reading partners. They, while not yet being readers by any means, were very active participants in the "readings." They were indulged in flights of fancy; inducted into the labor of learning new words and their "proper" pronunciations; questions and answers were exchanged in both directions; they confronted new information and revised and renewed the old in their repertoires; and witnessed tales of peril and stories of comfort-giving; all the while within the safety of a warm, jointly attentional interlude. Sometimes, the readings were restful or preceded bedtime; other times, they were transitional between high activity and a calmer state of being. We have written of symbol system exchanges as steps down the road toward literacy, which no doubt they are--they are also steps down an important road to relational well-being, and stability. The time spent in this engagement seems both a reflection of the future these children could have available to them for responsive, warm, and nurturing relationships. The children also appear on the road to becoming mutually committed to enacting relational exchanges that enhance the likelihood that they will feel loved and worthy of that love. Many of these experiences, especially if they are mutually negotiated, can provide them with relational/affective mental models of reciprocity in connection (Bretherton, Fritz, Zahn-Waxler, & Ridgeway, 1986). These children are learning vital conceptions that they are worthy of warm consistent attention and that there are people in their environment who can be counted upon to give them just this nurturant, sustaining care. They are learning to enact their attachments to those around them who are prepared to devote attentional resources to them, and to reveal the advantages of reciprocity, of trust, and of responsive communications.

Benefits of In Situ Observations of Shared Engagement

The careful analysis of the video data proved helpful in affording the opportunity to code both the verbal and the nonverbal interactions between the children and their interlocutors, such as pointing at the pictures, looking at each other, smiling, and hugging, all aspects that gave new insights into the joint attentional activities. Many investigators only observe interactive reading once, and that, during a session arranged by the examiner. Our approach demonstrated how parents from different cultural backgrounds spontaneously engage in joint book reading, and may offer a representation of its meaning and purposes in everyday experiences, thus supporting a deeper understanding of the cultural value the different contexts attribute to joint book reading. This goal is less effectively attained by research in which parents are explicitly asked to read a particular book at a particular time.

Potential Cultural Variations

It has yet to be determined whether this trajectory in emergent literacy is common across cultures or ethnic groups (Melzi & Caspe, 2005). Bus, Leseman, and Keultjes (2000) have suggested that the ethnic groups differed in how parents interacted with their children in joint book reading. The potential role of book reading as a stimulus for early literacy may vary among culturally divergent groups.

Affect and Cognition

Although some literacy professionals have tried to address the unity of cognition and emotions, the field as a whole has tended to disregard it. Piaget posited emotions to be the engines of cognition, although he did not pursue this proposition empirically. Goldstein and Dundon (1986) and other more recent investigators have underscored the utility of considering the interaction between affective and cognitive variables emerging in the study of both atypical and normative development. Our naturalistic observations acquired during days in young children's lives may provide a productive base for exploring how these psychological processes scaffold each other to enhance secure base interactions, during which children gain confidence in their capacity to take risks that enhance both their socio-affective and their intellectual maturational processes. Our data may indicate that it is not sufficient to plan compensatory interventions that simply encourage parents to practice joint book reading. Instead, it first might be necessary to understand the global meaning of that experience in context and the manner in which it is embedded within the family's daily activities.

(submitted 10/29/08; accepted 12/31/08)

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Catherine Ann Cameron

University of British Columbia, Canada

Giuliana Pinto

University of Florence, Italy

Note

(1) This article is produced from within the A Day in the Life project initiative and is reliant on work by our international team of colleagues: Julia Gillen, Lancaster University, UK; Beatrice Accorti Gamannossi, University of Florence, Italy; Sombat Tapanya, Chiang Mai University, Thailand; Roger Hancock, Open University, UK; Sue Young, University of Exeter, UK; Leslie Cameron, Carthage College, USA; Ayshe Talay-Ongan, ex Macquarie University, Australia. Our colleagues have taught us immeasurably about the value of international, interdisciplinary, collaborative research in studying young children. We are grateful to the delightful children and their participating families for so generously sharing a day in their lives with us so we might learn better the variations in cultural practices contributing to the development of strong children. Funders include: (via the Center for Research on Culture and Human Development, St. Francis Xavier University, directed by Tara Callaghan) the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council, Canada, Human Resources, Canada; British Council; the researchers' universities. We also acknowledge the endeavors of our colleagues' research assistants in each location where the days were gathered. See our project website at www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/ projects/dayinthelife/for further information, including the ethical dimensions of the project. The editor of this journal and her reviewers contributed to added clarity, making the process of bringing this article to the light of day a pleasure.

Note: Correspondence should be addressed to Catherine Ann Cameron, Honorary Professor, Psychology Department, 1208 Kenny Building, 2136 West Mall, University of British Columbia Vancouver, B.C., V6T 1Z4 Canada. E-mail: [e-mail]

Table 1
Methodological Summary

Research Phase         Researchers' Task      Research Activity

1. Initial             Two researchers        Parental informed
recruitment.           visit  families and    consent clearly
Families  solicited    explain all            achieved, followed by
had thriving           procedural details.    interview regarding
toddlers and were      Local researchers in   demographic
willing to invite      both Italy and U.S.    information, parenting
researchers into       are all                practices, and brief
their homes            psychologists.         filming practice.

2. Day in the Life     Local researchers      One researcher films
filming                return to home on a    day, while other takes
                       weekend day.           field notes and sketches
                                              surroundings.

3. Compilation         Two researchers from   Distal colleagues
selection              the  international     independently select at
                       team, but at other     least 6 approximately
                       location(s) view the   5-minute-long segments,
                       day and create         discuss  selections, and
                       half-hour              converge on a 30-minute
                       compilation of         compilation of clips
                       exemplary              that are used to elicit
                       interchanges.          family reflections on
                                              the day.

4. Iterative data      Researchers show       The two local
collection phase       family compilation.    researchers tape their
                                              interview of the family
                                              viewing and discussing
                                              the filmed clips of the
                                              day and pose further
                                              questions with respect
                                              to childrearing
                                              practices.

5. Data from the       Local researchers      Interview protocol
first four stages of   compile information    summaries, field notes,
data collection        from their data        environmental maps, and
shared with all        collection and send    video footage are
distal investigators   them to primary        distributed by the
                       investigators.         primary investigators to
                                              entire international
                                              team.

6. Consultations       International team     Sub-groups of
between team           members collaborate    international team
members and themes     on data analysis and   members work together on
are analyzed and       publication of         different themes
reported               findings.              initiated by one or more
                                              colleagues, and analyses
                                              are shared with all with
                                              expertise to contribute.

7. All available       Investigators          Protocol analyses are
data employed for      collaborate in         conducted and shared
analyses               examining data,        between researchers.
                       selecting  passages    Distal researchers
                       for analysis,          depend upon local
                       conducting analyses.   researchers to ensure
                                              cultural  integrity.
                                              Theory is grounded in
                                              the data.