ABSTRACT
Interactionist models of analysis in social psychology propose that the behaviour of individuals is the result of a continuous interaction between persons and the situations they encounter. This chapter examines relations between social-psychological family environment measures, person variables, and children's cognitive achievement. Data from the three age-cohorts in the Plowden follow-up study are used to examine the associations between family environment, intelligence, and measures of mathematics and English performance. Although there have been many investigations of the relations between the affective characteristics of children and their cognitive performance, the findings from the research remain inconsistent and inconclusive. Thomas and Znaniecki constructed a special form of the interactionist model to link social organization and social personality. By using complex multiple regression models to generate regression surfaces and by including prior measures of reading performance in the analysis, the chapter goes beyond much of previous research that has investigated the environmental correlates of cognitive development.
