Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experiences of Young American Children (1995), by Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley is a qualitative look at the at how parents and children interact during early childhood, as children acquire language and then develop their language skills. This longitudinal study examined 42 families, 23 of which were middle class and the remainder which were classified as professional (high SES) or welfare families (lowest SES), and their verbal interactions beginning when the child was 10 months of age and ending when the child was 3 years old.
The researchers noted that the biggest cause of difference in amount of utterances in an hour was SES status, rather than gender, race, birth order, and so forth. They observed that in any given hour, the children in professional families heard approximately 2, 153 words per hour in contrast to the children of welfare families, who heard an average of 616 words an hour. Once this data was extrapolated (in 1 year, children in professional families hear an average of 11 million utterances, while children in welfare families only hear 3 million utterances), the gap between the social classes became immense, and the implications of this gap is also immense. It is a contributor to the reason that students from lower SES families are at-risk for educational failure--they often enter with this oral deficit as well as with less exposure to print and being read aloud to.
Furthermore, after analyzing the data to see if there was a difference in the quality of the interactions in the different families, it was revealed that in the welfare homes, the children were more likely to hear "prohibitions"--being told that they couldn't do things. Interestingly, Hart and Risley concluded that the content of the language reflected the different values of each culture, the culture defined by the SES. In the professional families, the families were "concerned with names, relationships, and recall" (p. 133), preparing their children for a future in college and "analytic problem solving" (p. 133). In the welfare families, the focus seemed to be tradition--learning the socially acceptable--and "parents seemed to be preparing their children realistically for jobs likely to be open to them, jobs in which success and advancement would be determined by attitude, how well the children presented themselves, and whether they could prove themselves through performance" (p. 134). It is interesting that the talk in the home was qualitatively AND quantitatively different.
A quick summary of this study and its implications can be found here.
I would be interested to see how these observed differences played out in the children's education--did students of the welfare families struggle with reading as a result of this gap in oral language? Was that question addressed elsewhere in this book (aside from chapters 3 & 6)? I imagine that some achievement tests were done at the end of the study based on this statement, "....These quality features should be strongly linked to the children's accomplishments at age 3 and later. We would have been amazed, baffled, had we found otherwise" (p. 134). Also, I wonder if there would be any changes if this study were replicated in today's technology-saturated world? In fact, it is possible that in the professional families, the children would have an even stronger advantage (school age and beyond) because of their exposure to the Internet and all of the reading and writing that is done that way. Just thinking of the emails and texts these students send as well as how facile students from wealthier households are with technology than students who come from homes with no computers astounds me. This would be an interesting area to explore...how the haves and have nots differ educationally as a result of less exposure to computers and Internet.
I also wonder how the data would have differed had this study been done during the time when children were supposed to be seen and not heard. The world was a different place back then, and education wasn't a focus for many. it certainly wasn't seen as a necessity in the lower SES households......
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