UC Riverside

The causal explanations provided to young children provide the foundation for causal reasoning throughout life. Yet little research has examined what types of explanations parents provide to young children globally and how these explanations shape the emergence and development of children’s own worldviews. A cultural context in which supernatural explanations are more common than scientific explanations (or given alongside scientific explanations) may constrict children’s use of scientific causal mechanisms to understand and solve biological problems, such as illness. Such constraints could impede the efficacy of educational materials about how to avoid life-threatening illnesses (AIDS) or how to prevent illnesses (vaccines).

This project uses a multi-method approach (quantitative and qualitative analyses of justifications and cultural beliefs; ethnographic interviews) to study the emergence and endorsement of explanatory systems (folk knowledge, scientific, religious, supernatural) that are used by 4- to 6-year-old Mexican-American Catholic children and parents in the United States. Children and parents were either interviewed in English or in Spanish and asked about possible causes and treatments of the common cold and cancer.

Results indicated children and adults tend to endorse primarily natural causes (folk, scientific) as the causes of illnesses, but they endorse both natural (folk, scientific) and supernatural (religious, non-religious) causes to treat illnesses – with more supernatural causes endorsed for cancer than the common cold. There were also differences depending on the interview language for what causes children endorsed in the directed prompt task. Third, the majority of parents in both interview languages thought that they themselves should be the primary person to teach children about both illnesses, and on average, children in general should be at least around the age of 3.3-years-old to learn about the common cold, but they should wait until about 8.1-years-old to learn about cancer. Overall, this dissertation highlights the importance of examining the cultural context of children’s developing cognition in an under-researched, but steadily growing cultural community within the United States.