ABSTRACT
As discussed in Chapter 1, the pioneers in peer-relations research during the 1920s and 1930s berated the psychoanalytic tradition for building its basic theories with insights gathered exclusively from the study of people who demonstrated atypical and problematic social behaviour. Since that time, the call for more research on normal populations has been heeded. Ironically, many scholars are now engaged in eloquent appeals for more and better study of children with atypical development. Although research on children with atypical development has not declined since the 1920s and has indeed mushroomed, most of the research has been conducted with the certain purpose of understanding the atypical populations and finding better ways of educating them, not with the primary aim of acquiring knowledge about the human species that could contribute to developmental theory. One of the major challenges faced by contemporary scholars of child development is how to integrate data obtained from atypical and typical populations in formulating and refining coherent theories. One of the most comprehensive and readable writings on that problem is a chapter by Burack (1997), who offers a number of useful analogies to illustrate the importance of data from atypical samples. He notes that in physics, for example, scientists have discovered how to slow the motion of atoms almost to a standstill; studying the atoms in that extreme and unusual situation has provided valuable insights into their essential nature. Studying persons who have had brain injuries has been a mainstay of research in the neurosciences. Although many of the most influential early theorists in child development assigned little value to the study of exceptions to their general
rules, more recent scholars, led by Bronfenbrenner (Bronfenbrenner, Kessel, Kessen and White, 1986), argued against this general world view that they regarded as too broad to capture the realities of children in their social worlds.They advocated, with some success, greater attention to individual, environmental and social differences. This chapter - along with Chapter 9 on cultural differences and the discussions on gender differences in Chapters 2 and 7 - describes only some of the work that has been conducted to understand individual differences in children’s social relations.
