ABSTRACT
The invited symposium honored the long and distinguished career of the late developmental psychologist, Ruth Hagberg Munroe, Research Professor of Psychology at Pitzer College, former Secretary-General and Honorary Fellow of IACCP. Trained by Beatrice and John Whiting, Ruth and her husband and colleague, Robert L. Munroe, carried out major fieldwork projects in American Samoa, Belize, Kenya, and Nepal. Ruth published steadily and widely, focusing primarily on the causes, correlates, and consequences of children’s behaviors and designing systematic observational methods to improve our understanding of children. The symposium featured invited presentations by researchers who were her friends and colleagues and who shared her interests in developmental questions in cross-cultural context. The initial presentations in the symposium examined children’s behaviors cross-culturally, the first reanalyzing data from the Six Cultures communities regarding gender differences in games and play, and the second looking at a number of different behaviors of Asian children. The next three presentations focused upon a single culture, the first two looking at Mayan culture, one examining weaving as an activity influenced by socialization and development, the other examining factors that influence the organization of children’s daily activities The final presentation compared the methodologies and findings of several large-scale cross-cultural studies of gender with those of the Munroes’ observational projects.
