Thomas S Weisner
Biographic Data
| ID | 92891 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Thomas S Weisner |
| GIVEN NAMES | Thomas S |
| FAMILY NAME | Weisner |
| SIGNATURE | WEISNER T S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Los Angeles |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7209-5788 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 57 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 726 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 57 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1976 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Some reflections from my wonderful career in Psychological Anthropology
Our Ethos editors have launched an occasional section with contributions by SPA members for a brief commentary; I appreciate the invitation. The editors suggested informal reflections on some of the traditions of Psychological Anthropology that I have experienced and value in my career. There are many traditions worth sustaining, and celebrating them is one of my goals—a blend of my advocacy of and for our field, and some advice for the field in …
Parenting: The Perspective from Psychological Anthropology
Mixed Methods in Psychological Anthropology
The Cambridge Handbook of Psychological Anthropology
Bringing together contributions from a global team of renowned scholars, this Handbook provides a comprehensive guide to the dynamic field of psychological anthropology. It is divided into five parts and includes a critical updating of the theoretical foundations for psychological anthropology, covering cognitive, psychodynamic, linguistic, and phenomenological views. It provides the first-ever lifespan perspective on human development in culture…
Still the Most Important Influence on Human Development: Culture, Context, and Methods Pluralism
Obituary for Ucla and University of California University Professor Robert B. Edgerton
ADHD in context: Young adults' reports of the impact of occupational environment on the manifestation of ADHD
Culture: The missing link in health research
Childhood: Anthropological Aspects
Parenting a Child with Autism in India: Narratives Before and After a Parent–Child Intervention Program
Practice to research: Integrating evidence-based practices with culture and context
There are ways to integrate culturally competent services (CCS) and evidence-based practices (EBP) which can improve the experiences of patients and their families and communities when faced with health problems, as well as the effectiveness and positive experiences of practitioners. CCS and EBP evidence should be jointly deployed for helping patients and clinicians. Partnership research models are useful for achieving the integration of CCS and …
Adults with autism in India: A mixed-method approach to make meaning of daily routines
Mixing qualitative and quantitative research in developmental science: Uses and methodological choices
Multiple methods are vital to understanding development as a dynamic, transactional process. This article focuses on the ways in which quantitative and qualitative methodologies can be combined to enrich developmental science and the study of human development, focusing on the practical questions of when and how. Research situations that may be especially suited to mixing qualitative and quantitative approaches are described. The authors also dis…
Everyday Ruptures: Children, Youth, and Migration in Global Perspective. CatiCoe, Rachel R.Reynolds, Deborah A.Boehm, Julia MeredithHess, and HeatherRae‐Espinoza, eds. Nashville: Vanderbilt. 2011. vii…
Walter Rochs Goldschmidt (1913-2010)
If You Work in This Country You Should Not be Poor, and Your Kids Should be Doing Better: Bringing Mixed Methods and Theory in Psychological Anthropology to Improve Research in Policy and Practice
NewHope (NH) was a successful poverty reduction program that offered a positive social contract to working-poor adults. If you worked full time, you were eligible to receive income supplements, childcare vouchers, health care benefits, a community service job, and client respect.NHdid reduce poverty and increase income and earnings for some participants, and improved outcomes for some children. But in spite of relatively generous benefits,NHwas o…
John and Beatrice Whiting's Contributions to the Cross-Cultural Study of Human Development: Their Values, Goals, Norms, and Practices
The Whiting vision of a holistic, interdisciplinary, cross-cultural understanding of human development continues today. The Whiting team approach had an ethos, core intellectual projects, and ways of working-their practices, norms, goals, and values. The Whitings believed that the cultural learning environment (CLE) is a powerful influence on development, but not the only one. The Whitings asked descriptive, process, causal, and functional questi…
Youths' Caretaking of Their Adolescent Sisters' Children: Results From Two Longitudinal Studies
The extent and experiences of youths' caretaking of their adolescent sisters' children have been assessed in two longitudinal studies. The first study examines the caretaking patterns of 132 Latino and African American youth during middle and late adolescence. The second study involves 110 Latino youth whose teenage sister has recently given birth. Youth are studied at 6 weeks and 6 months postpartum. In both studies, girls provide more hours of …
Culture, Development, and Diversity: Expectable Pluralism, Conflict, and Similarity
Cultural values and scripts for parenting can be inconsistent, producing intrapsychic and cultural conflict. For example, many middle-class U.S. parents encourage independence, self-reliance, and autonomy in children, yet also encourage children to seek out help and look for attention from adults. Parents respond with egoistic recognition of children's achievements-a set of contradictions that lead to dependency conflicts. Another example of conf…
Pursuits of Happiness: Well-Being in Anthropological Perspective
The Urie Bronfenbrenner Top 19: Looking Back at His Bioecological Perspective
Urie Bronfenbrenner had a major influence in human development research and theory, developmental psychology, and formulation of social policy. This book, Making Human Beings Human, brings together
Mixing qualitative and quantitative research in developmental science: Uses and methodological choices
Multiple methods are vital to understanding development as a dynamic, transactional process. This article focuses on the ways in which quantitative and qualitative methodologies can be combined to enrich developmental science and the study of human development, focusing on the practical questions of "when" and "how." Research situations that may be especially suited to mixing qualitative and quantitative approaches are described. The authors also…
Understanding New Hope: A Successful Antipoverty Program for Working Poor Adults and Their Children
Youths' Caretaking of Their Adolescent Sisters' Children: Its Costs and Benefits for Youths' Development
This study examined how time spent caring for a teenage sister's child and experiences in providing care related to youths' young adult outcomes. Latino and African American youths (N = 108) were studied during middle and late adolescence. Results indicated that youths who provided many hours of child care were more stressed and had lower school grades but also reported a greater life satisfaction, a stronger school orientation, and were less lik…
Attachment as a Cultural and Ecological Problem with Pluralistic Solutions
Commentaries| April 11 2005 Attachment as a Cultural and Ecological Problem with Pluralistic Solutions Subject Area: Psychiatry and Psychology , Women's and Children's Health Thomas S. Weisner Thomas S. Weisner University of California, Los Angeles, Calif., USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Human Development (2005) 48 (1-2): 89–94. https://doi.org/10.1159/000083219 Article history Published Online: Apri…
The Cambridge Handbook of Psychological Anthropology
Bringing together contributions from a global team of renowned scholars, this Handbook provides a comprehensive guide to the dynamic field of psychological anthropology. It is divided into five parts and includes a critical updating of the theoretical foundations for psychological anthropology, covering cognitive, psychodynamic, linguistic, and phenomenological views. It provides the first-ever lifespan perspective on human development in culture…
My Brother's Keeper: Child and Sibling Caretaking [and Comments and Reply]
Children often act as caretakers responsible for other children. Such child caretaking varies widely in its frequency, as well as in the degree of institutionalization, relationship to parental caretaking, degree of indulgence, and incidence at differing ages. Residence and household patterns, size of the family, and the subsistence economy, daily routines, and work load of the family are important in determining availability of child caretakers …
Culture: The missing link in health research
Mixing qualitative and quantitative research in developmental science: Uses and methodological choices
Multiple methods are vital to understanding development as a dynamic, transactional process. This article focuses on the ways in which quantitative and qualitative methodologies can be combined to enrich developmental science and the study of human development, focusing on the practical questions of "when" and "how." Research situations that may be especially suited to mixing qualitative and quantitative approaches are described. The authors also…
You have to push it—who's gonna raise your kids?’: Situating child care and child care subsidy use in the daily routines of lower income families
The Ecocultural Project of Human Development: Why Ethnography and Its Findings Matter
Ethnography produces believable findings that matter both to those we study and to the social sciences. Ethnography is best suited to understanding human development as an adaptive project of individuals and communities-that is, what families and communities are trying to accomplish to meet their goals in their cultural world, and the cultural pathways that are available for children to achieve those goals
The social construction and subjective reality of activity settings: Implications for community psychology
A major focus of the article is the idea that activity settings are in part social constructions of the participants. The socially constructed “meaning” of an activity setting is a complex mix of ecological, cultural, interactional, and psychological features. These features may be observed and assessed, directly and indirectly, in terms of personnel, cultural values, tasks, scripts for conduct, and motives and purposes of actors. Empirical illus…
Impacts on Children of a Policy to Promote Employment and Reduce Poverty for Low-Income Parents: New Hope After 5 Years
The impacts of New Hope, a program to increase parent employment and reduce poverty, were measured 5 years after parents were randomly assigned to program or control groups. New Hope had positive effects on children's school achievement, motivation, and social behavior, primarily for boys, across the age range 6-16. In comparison to impacts measured 2 years after program onset, effects on achievement were robust, but effects on social behavior we…
The rural-urban migrant network in Kenya: Some General Implications
Rural-urban migration patterns in many settings involve extensive contacts between the city and the country. Such contacts are conceptualized as a rural-urban network of kin who share resources and who visit frequently. Neither setting can be viewed independently of the other. Six antecedent conditions are suggested that should encourage the formation of rural-urban network migration systems. The Influence of the rural-urban network in Kenya is i…
The American Dependency Conflict: Continuities and Discontinuities in Behavior and Values of Countercultural Parents and Their Children
Beatrice Whiting recognized the American "dependency conflict": parental training for independence and selfreliance values, while at the same time rewarding dominantdependence and seeking attention in parent-child interaction. The countercultural youth of the 1960s and 1970s valued interdependence and questioned authority and dominance. A study of 150 countercultural parents and their childen, and a comparison sample of 50 two-parent married pare…
Unpackaging Cultural Effects on Classroom Learning: Native Hawaiian Peer Assistance and Child-Generated Activity
Cultural analysis of differential minority achievement can create stereotypes and restrict expectations of child performance if group-level cultural generalizations are misapplied to individuals. Observational and interview studies of sibling caretaking and peer assistance in Native Hawaiian contexts illustrate the appropriate comparative analysis of natal and school activity settings. Results indicate Native Hawaiian sibling caretaking varies wi…
Putting Family Ideals into Practice: Pronaturalism in Conventional and Nonconventional California Families
Teaching Participant-Observation Research Methods: A Skills-Building Approach
In spite of long-standing interest among social scientists in participant-observation field methods there is little published material on how to teach these methods. In this paper the authors discuss a course they have offered at UCLA for the past six years. The course features experiential-learning, simulation of fieldwork, and both student and teacher reflexivity. These teaching strategies are meant to facilitate student learning in five essent…
I Speak a Different Dialect: Teen Explanatory Models of Difference and Disability
What do teens with disabilities believe about their conditions, and what do they understand to be the causes, correlates, and consequences of disability? We elicited a cultural explanatory model (EM) of disability from longitudinal sample of 23 European American adolescents with varied cognitive disabilities and delay. We asked teens how they were similar to different from others; the name of this difference; its causes, severity, course, effects…
Culture, Development, and Diversity: Expectable Pluralism, Conflict, and Similarity
Cultural values and scripts for parenting can be inconsistent, producing intrapsychic and cultural conflict. For example, many middle-class U.S. parents encourage independence, self-reliance, and autonomy in children, yet also encourage children to seek out help and look for attention from adults. Parents respond with egoistic recognition of children's achievements-a set of contradictions that lead to dependency conflicts. Another example of conf…
Domestic tasks, gender egalitarian values and children's gender typing in conventional and nonconventional families
Adults with autism in India: A mixed-method approach to make meaning of daily routines
EthnoNotes: An Internet-Based Field Note Management Tool
This report describes a field notes database management tool, EthnoNotes. Ethno-Notes makes the process of writing, sharing, and analyzing field notes easier and more systematic. Text can be indexed, coded, and integrated with quantitative data or images, all accessed from the same database system. EthnoNotes can be used by individual researchers or be fully Internet-based, accessible online by teams collaborating in empirical studies. Field note…
Ecocultural Pathways, Family Values, and Parenting
Behavior Sampling and Ethnography: Complementary Methods for Understanding Home-School Connections among Latino Immigrant Families
Both ethnography and experience-sampling methods (ESMs) are effective for assessing children's home activities. The authors combined them to examine home activities that were school-like, complementary to school, or unrelated to school. The activities were then related to children's school achievement in a sample of low-income Latino immigrant families and their tento eleven-year-old children at risk for low school achievement. Children reported …
Nonconventional Family Life-Styles and School Achievement: A 12-Year Longitudinal Study
The life-styles of countercultural, nonconventional families have potential risks as well as benefits for children’s school achievement. The effects on children’s school achievement of nonconventional family organization, parents’ values and commitment to their family life-style, and family stability were examined in a 12-year longitudinal study of 146 nonconventional families and a comparison group of 43 stable, two-parent conventional families.…
Concordance Between Ethnographer and Folk Perspectives: Observed Performance and Self-Ascription of Sibling Caretaking Roles
This paper compares field observers' perceptions of role performance with culture members' reports of what their roles are. Children's and field observers' judgments concerning child caretaking in Honolulu, Hawaii, were compared. The results show (1) statistically significant concordance between the two sets of reports; (2) fairly low (50%) agreement on who cares for the child; and (3) fairly high (80%) agreement on children's reports of being a …
Youths' Caretaking of Their Adolescent Sisters' Children: Results From Two Longitudinal Studies
The extent and experiences of youths' caretaking of their adolescent sisters' children have been assessed in two longitudinal studies. The first study examines the caretaking patterns of 132 Latino and African American youth during middle and late adolescence. The second study involves 110 Latino youth whose teenage sister has recently given birth. Youth are studied at 6 weeks and 6 months postpartum. In both studies, girls provide more hours of …
Urban-Rural Differences in Sociable and Disruptive Behavior of Kenya Children
Ms. Rossetti has made some useful observations about mice and men. Rural children do indeed seem to be friendlier and more sociable than their city cousins, at least in Kenya. And the country child in Kenya, although far from timid, seems to display fewer dominant and aggressive social behaviors in the rural setting than occur in the city. Ms. Rossetti also has the germ of a theory for these differences urban children and mothers eat store bought…
Urban-Rural Differences in African Children s Performance on Cognitive and Memory Tasks
Kariobangi: The Case History of a Squatter Resettlement Scheme in Kenya
Urban-Rural Differences in African Children s Performance on Cognitive and Memory Tasks
My Brother's Keeper: Child and Sibling Caretaking [and Comments and Reply]
Children often act as caretakers responsible for other children. Such child caretaking varies widely in its frequency, as well as in the degree of institutionalization, relationship to parental caretaking, degree of indulgence, and incidence at differing ages. Residence and household patterns, size of the family, and the subsistence economy, daily routines, and work load of the family are important in determining availability of child caretakers …
Women, Modernity, and Stress: Three Contrasting Contexts for Change in East Africa
Women in East Africa more often confront change and modernization in vicarious and / or indirect ways; men more often participate directly in bounded institutions such as bureaucracies, factories, or schools. This differential experience of postcolonial change means that the family and local community as well as the domestic subsistence economy are important in women's adaptations. To understand modernization and the stress which may accompany it…
The rural-urban migrant network in Kenya: Some General Implications
Rural-urban migration patterns in many settings involve extensive contacts between the city and the country. Such contacts are conceptualized as a rural-urban network of kin who share resources and who visit frequently. Neither setting can be viewed independently of the other. Six antecedent conditions are suggested that should encourage the formation of rural-urban network migration systems. The Influence of the rural-urban network in Kenya is i…
Urban-Rural Differences in Sociable and Disruptive Behavior of Kenya Children
Ms. Rossetti has made some useful observations about mice and men. Rural children do indeed seem to be friendlier and more sociable than their city cousins, at least in Kenya. And the country child in Kenya, although far from timid, seems to display fewer dominant and aggressive social behaviors in the rural setting than occur in the city. Ms. Rossetti also has the germ of a theory for these differences urban children and mothers eat store bought…
Teaching Participant-Observation Research Methods: A Skills-Building Approach
In spite of long-standing interest among social scientists in participant-observation field methods there is little published material on how to teach these methods. In this paper the authors discuss a course they have offered at UCLA for the past six years. The course features experiential-learning, simulation of fieldwork, and both student and teacher reflexivity. These teaching strategies are meant to facilitate student learning in five essent…
Concordance Between Ethnographer and Folk Perspectives: Observed Performance and Self-Ascription of Sibling Caretaking Roles
This paper compares field observers' perceptions of role performance with culture members' reports of what their roles are. Children's and field observers' judgments concerning child caretaking in Honolulu, Hawaii, were compared. The results show (1) statistically significant concordance between the two sets of reports; (2) fairly low (50%) agreement on who cares for the child; and (3) fairly high (80%) agreement on children's reports of being a …
News of the Society for Psychological Anthropology
Putting Family Ideals into Practice: Pronaturalism in Conventional and Nonconventional California Families
Society For Psychological Anthropology
Vygotsky and the Social Formation of Mind . James V. Wertsch
Unpackaging Cultural Effects on Classroom Learning: Native Hawaiian Peer Assistance and Child-Generated Activity
Cultural analysis of differential minority achievement can create stereotypes and restrict expectations of child performance if group-level cultural generalizations are misapplied to individuals. Observational and interview studies of sibling caretaking and peer assistance in Native Hawaiian contexts illustrate the appropriate comparative analysis of natal and school activity settings. Results indicate Native Hawaiian sibling caretaking varies wi…
Living with Difference: Families with Dwarf Children. Joan Ablon
Nonconventional Family Life-Styles and School Achievement: A 12-Year Longitudinal Study
The life-styles of countercultural, nonconventional families have potential risks as well as benefits for children’s school achievement. The effects on children’s school achievement of nonconventional family organization, parents’ values and commitment to their family life-style, and family stability were examined in a 12-year longitudinal study of 146 nonconventional families and a comparison group of 43 stable, two-parent conventional families.…
The social construction and subjective reality of activity settings: Implications for community psychology
A major focus of the article is the idea that activity settings are in part social constructions of the participants. The socially constructed “meaning” of an activity setting is a complex mix of ecological, cultural, interactional, and psychological features. These features may be observed and assessed, directly and indirectly, in terms of personnel, cultural values, tasks, scripts for conduct, and motives and purposes of actors. Empirical illus…
Domestic tasks, gender egalitarian values and children's gender typing in conventional and nonconventional families
Analyzing Words in Brief Descriptions: Fathers and Mothers Describe Their Children
The Ecocultural Project of Human Development: Why Ethnography and Its Findings Matter
Ethnography produces believable findings that matter both to those we study and to the social sciences. Ethnography is best suited to understanding human development as an adaptive project of individuals and communities-that is, what families and communities are trying to accomplish to meet their goals in their cultural world, and the cultural pathways that are available for children to achieve those goals
Values That Matter
Children investing in their families: The importance of child obligation in successful development
Family obligation and assistance are fundamental features of children's development that link general developmental processes with the context of a particular historical moment and a specific cultural community
The American Dependency Conflict: Continuities and Discontinuities in Behavior and Values of Countercultural Parents and Their Children
Beatrice Whiting recognized the American "dependency conflict": parental training for independence and selfreliance values, while at the same time rewarding dominantdependence and seeking attention in parent-child interaction. The countercultural youth of the 1960s and 1970s valued interdependence and questioned authority and dominance. A study of 150 countercultural parents and their childen, and a comparison sample of 50 two-parent married pare…
Introduction: Honoring the Contributions of Beatrice B. Whiting
Behavior Sampling and Ethnography: Complementary Methods for Understanding Home-School Connections among Latino Immigrant Families
Both ethnography and experience-sampling methods (ESMs) are effective for assessing children's home activities. The authors combined them to examine home activities that were school-like, complementary to school, or unrelated to school. The activities were then related to children's school achievement in a sample of low-income Latino immigrant families and their tento eleven-year-old children at risk for low school achievement. Children reported …
Ecocultural Understanding of Children's Developmental Pathways
Every cultural community provides developmental pathways for children within some ecological-cultural (ecocultural) context. Cultural pathways are made up of everyday routines of life, and routines are made up of cultural activities children engage. Activities (bedtime, playing video games, homework, watching TV, cooking dinner, soccer practice, visiting grandma, babysitting for money, algebra class) are useful units for cultural analysis because…
Psychology (37 works) · Sociology (33 works) · Developmental psychology (25 works) · Early Childhood Education and Development (22 works) · Social Psychology (16 works) · Political science (15 works) · Cultural Differences and Values (13 works) · Medicine (12 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Library science (10 works)