SOCIALIZATION AS AN INTERACTIONAL PROCESS: A COMPARISON OF TWO DAY CARE CENTERS.

Abstract

An interactional model of the socialization process was used to investigate how children develop social competence in the day care center. Socialization is a multimodal process through which messages about how to behave in socially appropriate ways are communicated to children through several modes of communication. The interactional model describes one mode of socialization--the socialization event. Socialization events are interpersonal interactions in which the appropriateness of one or more interactants is explicitly discussed. During such events, socialization agents call upon their repertoires of interactional strategies and linguistic routines to accomplish culturally defined goals of socialization. Over six hundred socialization events were recorded in two day care centers which served different ethnic groups. Research with Anglo and Mexican-American populations revealed that cultural values and educational philosophies affected the way social interaction was organized and the types of socialization events found in the day care centers. Statistical analyses of the socialization events recorded in the two centers revealed significant differences in the ways the socialization process was organized in them. In both centers, there were gender differences in the socialization of individual children. At the Anglo center, emphasis was placed on the socialization of individual boys, while socialization in the Mexican-American center was concerned primarily with groups of children. Differences in the behavior of the teachers at the two centers during socialization events were found to be related to their ethnic background and philosophies of education. Contextual variation in socialization events was also found in the two centers. At the Mexican-American center, significant differences were found in socialization during academic and non-academic contexts. In the Anglo center, contextual variation was attributed to differences in the size of the group of children involved in the activity and the participant structure used to organize interaction during the activity. The results of these analyses indicated that the interactional model of socialization offers insight into both intracultural and cross-cultural variation in the socialization process.