ABSTRACT
One of the principal aims of our longitudinal study of early personality development, begun at the Boston University School of Medicine–Massachusetts Memorial Hospital’s Medical Center in 1954, was the investigation of the mother–child relationship. The study was of a naturalistic exploratory type, planned to provide frequent opportunities to observe mother and child together in a variety of situations over the first 6 years of life. Only primiparous mothers were selected to keep the factor of mothering experience comparable in the groups. Detailed descriptions were made at each contact of the behavior of the mother, of the child, and of the interaction between them. Thus, for each mother–child pair a longitudinal descriptive account was obtained of the progression of outstanding characteristics their interaction demonstrated in these well-defined situations over the years of the study. Comparable observations have been gathered on 22 of the mother–child pairs from birth through the 36th month of life. We have begun to analyze this extensive interactional material, and are presenting in this paper one of the avenues of approach to this task that we are following at present. This approach consists of dividing the interactional data gathered for each pair into a sequence of time segments and making evaluations of interactions prominent in each segment. We are using these evaluations to study the proposal that in this early period there are a series of issues that are being negotiated in the interaction between mother and child. The paper will present the theoretical considerations and the observational materials that have suggested such a possibility.
