Assessing Parenting in Context: Naturalistic Assessment, Domain Specificity, and Early Development

This chapter advances the premise that a truer understanding of the manner in which parenting impacts young children requires the study of parenting in naturalistic, in-home contexts, a premise that accords with Bronfenbrenner’s (1977) call for the study of child development and its determinants in naturalistic settings. The chapter is organized around three main points: (1) To truly understand parental determinants of development, it is advantageous to study parent-child relationships and development in the contexts in which they naturally occur, for sufficiently representative periods of time, to enable the identification of parent-child interactions in specific developmental domains of interest. The ability to accomplish this has become easier with technological advancements in video and audio systems and the development of “wearables” that enable passive, moment-to-moment, relatively non-intrusive data collection; (2) to address and challenge the assumption, implicit in developmental research, that parenting quality is trait-like and stable across different family contexts; and (3) to advance the point that parenting’s effects on specific developmental outcomes will be most clearly documented by taking into account the theoretical match between the in-home context in which parent-child interaction takes place and the developmental outcomes under study.