Children's Kinship Concepts: Cognitive Development and Early Experience among the Hausa

• Published in: Ethnology 1974-01, Vol.13 (1), p.25-44
• Main Authors: LeVine, Robert A., Price-Williams, Douglass R.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adults; Age groups; Brothers; Child development; Child/Children/Childhood; Children; Grandmothers; Kin/Kinship; Kinship; Mothers; Parents; Society, The, of; Terminology
• ISSN: 0014-1828
• DOI: 10.2307/3773126

The goal was to develop a method for the cross-cultural analysis of children's thinking & experience, a method connected more intimately with the most familiar aspects of their environments than with particular theoretical formulation. A pilot study of 53 Hausa (Nigerian) children aged 4 to 11 is described. In informal taped interviews, the children were asked who lives in their compounds, how each person is related to them & to one other resident, & a few other questions about kin terms & left-right orientation. Results showed that: (1) abilities to apply kin terms to ego-centered & other-centered relationships, & to define a kin term, increase pronouncedly with age; (2) younger children can apply kin terms to ego-centered relationships but show little ability to apply them in other-centered relationships; (3) abilities to apply kin terms to ego-centered & other-centered relationships are correlated with each other & with one test of left-right reversibility, holding age constant, in the sample; (4) the youngest children tended to identify compound residents in terms of physical presence, location, stature, nicknames, or visible occupation rather than relational concepts, & to define kin terms with specific persons & their actions rather than with general properties underlying the relationships; (5) results of children's census reports are consistent with ethnographic data on SD between the sexes in Hausa compounds (closer relation-of mother to children of both sexes when they are young, etc); (6) most children who could answer the question defined "grandparent" as mother's mother, which is consistent with ethnographic data on the unique role of the maternal grandmother. This straightforward naturalistic approach yields data of manifold theoretical import on the thinking & subjective experience of children. 5 Tables, 1 Figure. Modified Author's Summary.