ABSTRACT
In an effort to quantify the differences in child upbringing a Child Management Scale was developed and tested in the four large institutions in which the field studies had been carried out. This scale was then applied in a Local Authority hostel, and the living units of a voluntary home, which cared for mentally retarded children similar to the children in some, but not all, of the wards of the mental subnormality hospital. The term ‘hypotheses’ may seem rather grand for predictions which have a relatively low level of generality, even though several of them were derived from a more general proposition, namely that ‘householdness’ would be associated with child-oriented patterns of care. The consistency of the relationship between staff activities and the patterns of child management as between hostels and hospitals in our study was one of the most persistent features of our research.
