Founding Statement of Purpose

Educational Objectives

Rationale for the Program

The partitioning of healthy human development into the disciplinary containers of academics has always been a messy business, with a shifting tension between increasingly focused analysis of details within boundaries on the one hand, and insightful integration of previously isolated knowledge on the other. The last two decades, however, have witnessed a change in the dynamics of these complementary processes. Within several of the relevant disciplines, a rethinking or redefinition of core issues has created a broad internal need for knowledge and perspective from outside specialties; thus current pressures for integration reflect not only a knitting together of interests at the joint periphery, but also a more immediate need to solve fundamental intellectual and practical problems within formally separate spheres. Further, these parallel internal revolutions, taken jointly, suggest the possibility of an important new synthesis concerning the interplay of culture, health, and human development.

The graduate certificate in Culture, Health, and Human Development is designed primarily to encourage and reward students who wish to reach out to this interdisciplinary endeavor from their base in an established degree program. At the same time, the interdisciplinary program being built around the certificate will facilitate collaboration among faculty who are interested in pursuing this synthesis, and, more generally, create a point of growth for an emerging interdiscipline that could become a distinctive feature of the academic enterprise at the University of Connecticut.

The academic study of human development has in fact always been an evolving interdisciplinary mixture, concerned in various ways with both cultural context and bio-psycho-social health. For a variety of reasons, early conceptualizations were focused primarily on the immature organism. The emergence of "child development" as an identifiable field, out of late-nineteenth-century antecedents in philosophy and the nascent social and biological sciences, is generally located by scholars in the late 1920s and early 1930s (1). It was during this period that the National Research Council formed the Committee on Child Development, and hitherto parochial interests coalesced as the Society for Research in Child Development under the leadership of an extraordinary group from several disciplines, including Arnold Gesell (pediatrics), Robert S. Lynd (sociology), Myrtle McGraw (psychology), Margaret Mead (anthropology), and T. Wingate Todd (anatomy). Although the Society has survived in good health, the parent disciplines have generally gone more separate ways in the intervening years.

The fields of psychology and pediatrics have also been successful in elaborating "development" as a core construct in their theoretical orientation. Within psychology, the speciality of developmental psychology emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s with a strong dependence on experimental techniques to study changes over age in perception, learning, and social behavior. Two decades later (2), however, renewed concern with aspects of human development not so easily modeled in the laboratory led to a surge of basic research in the familial, social, cultural and historical context of child development. At the same time, a growing awareness of "development" beyond adolescence brought together several emerging traditions (3) in the field of adulthood and aging (4) to enable a more truly lifespan orientation (5). The focus on social context that has been emphasized in this field draws from both what are now called psychological anthropology (6) and life-course sociology (7), contributing to a greater understanding of the organized diversity of developmental conditions and trajectories (8). From the point of view of sociology and anthropology, re-discovery of the life course has contributed to a better understanding of intergenerational continuities and discontinuities in beliefs and behaviors (9).

Pediatrics has undergone its own set of transformations since the establishment of scientific medicine in the late 19th century; from descriptive pediatrics in the early 20th century, through the golden age of curative pediatrics in the 1920s and prophylactic pediatrics in the 1950s, to the current period of focus on what has been called "the new morbidity" of school problems, behavioral disturbances, allergies and psychosomatic syndromes, chronic diseases, adjustment difficulties, and the challenge of promoting sound development amidst everyday life stresses, particularly among families in poverty (10). The current mandate, as many observers have commented, is premised on the active, developing, adapting, learning child (11). Indeed developmental and behavioral pediatrics is now a well established specialty, with several major journals, compendia, and handbooks. Pediatricians have recently become the second-largest professional group in the Society for Research in Child Development (after psychologists), providing one marker of the fulfilment Anderson's early call for a collaboration between pediatrics and child psychology (12).

As lifespan development is a relative newcomer in the social and behavioral sciences, so is geriatrics a recent development in the medical sciences. Like its sister disciplines of pediatrics and lifespan development, geriatrics has its own unique experience of the intellectual and social trends which are being joined in this proposal: a recognition of internally organized development as a primary force in individual change at all stages of life, and a new awareness of the power of social context to shape that development. In addition, of course, advances in biological science and the demography of social change have played an important role in shaping this speciality's need for the intellectual tools of other disciplines (13).

More generally, the conceptual and programmatic revolution that took place in the 1970's concerning health -- a shift away from "curing" and toward "prevention" and "health promotion" -- introduced a new role for the behavioral and social sciences in health research, one that highlights the importance of culturally organized, individual behavior. The World Health Organization states the case succinctly (14): "Psychosocial factors have been increasingly recognized as key factors in the success of health and social actions. If actions are to be effective in the prevention of diseases and in the promotion of health and well being, they must be based on an understanding of culture, tradition, beliefs and patterns of family interactions."

• Formation of interdisciplinary study groups, such as the Committee on Culture, Health, and Human Development at the Social Sciences Research Council (15);
• Recent predominance of "culture" as an indexed term in, for example, the program listings for the bi-annual meetings of the Society for Research in Child Development (16);
• Inclusion of cultural issues in the diagnostic procedures used by the mental health professions (17);
• Regulatory action requiring evidence of training in diversity issues for professional licensing and accreditation (18);
• Emergence of new academic subspecialties, such as cross-cultural counseling, developmental pediatrics, community medicine, and ethnomedicine;
• Critical reviews of international policies and programs for maternal and child health that have traditionally slighted a developmental perspective and the role of culture in human behavior (19);
• Emphasis by funding entities that there is a primary need for new research on cultural issues, especially as they apply to the preparation of children for productive citizenship (20)
• Calls by funding agencies for interdisciplinary research training that synthesizes recent advances in the social, behavioral, and biomedical sciences (21).

The University of Connecticut is well positioned to respond to these trends by preparing students in the overlapping aspects of culture, health, and human development. Child development was first taught here as a topic in its own right in 1930-31, in what is now the School of Family Studies. This course was appropriately interdisciplinary in its scope, focusing on the "physical, psychological, and social aspects" of the growing child and the family context (22). Today, all the strands of basic and applied research relevant to the interdisciplinary study of lifespan development are well represented at UConn, but, following the pattern seen in other institutions of higher education, they have become specialized and, in many instances, separated in their advances.

The biological bases and regulation of development, encompassing both evolutionary and organismic perspectives, are topics of scholarship and practice in several University units, including, on the Storrs campus, Biobehavioral Sciences, Nursing, Nutritional Sciences, Allied Health, Psychology, and other participants in the neurosciences program. At the Health Center, the departments of Pediatrics, Community Health, and Psychiatry and the Center on Aging are among the most central to this proposal, although of course ultimately all the basic science areas are relevant. The experimental approach to understanding behavioral and psychological development in children and adults has its roots in the traditions of academic psychology. At present, it is represented at the University of Connecticut in the Department of Psychology, the Department of Educational Psychology, the School of Family Studies, and the Department of Communication Sciences. The context of development and healthy functioning is also a focus for several units, including Anthropology, Sociology, Family Studies, Nursing, Social Work, Psychiatry, and Community Health. Finally, it can be noted that the traditions of theoretically driven design and evaluation of interventions for healthy development, increasingly recognized as both good science and good use of science, are also manifest in many forms at the University of Connecticut's professional schools and programs, e.g in Pediatrics, Psychiatry, Community Health, Nutritional Sciences, the Cooperative Extension Program, Family Studies, Nursing, Communication Sciences, Education, Allied Health, Clinical Psychology, and elsewhere.

What potentially unites these dispersed traditions is the insight that the process of healthy development includes and transcends each of them. Although important specialization continues to push in further detail each particular domain of knowledge, there is now an emerging integration of these specifics back into a useful framework for understanding healthy human development at all stages of life.

At UConn, faculty have formed a variety of individual, cross-unit alliances over the years, such as joint appointments, outside members of doctoral committees, collaborative research projects, and informal groups to explore mutual interests (24). Many of these alliances involve faculty who are highly regarded as leaders in their own specialties, and who have significant experience in organized, externally funded research. The University of Connecticut has a substantial core of scientific leaders whose work already places them at the interface of culture, health, and human development, and the Center for Culture, Health, and Human Development is intended to build from this historical base of collaboration toward an innovative, powerful, and visible use of UConn's resources.

Endnotes:

1. Siegel, A. W., & White, S. H. (1982). The child study movement: Early growth and development of the symbolized child. Advances in child behavior and development, 17, 233-285. Smuts, A. B. (1985). The National Council Committee on Child Development and the founding of the Society for Research in Child Development, 1925-1933. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 50(4-5), 108-135.
2. E. g. Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Kessen, W. (1979). The American child and other cultural inventions. American Psychologist, 34, 815-820. McCall, R. B. (1977). Challenges to a science of developmental psychology. Child Development, 48, 333-344.
3. Interestingly, the field of aging traces its intellectual roots to include G. Stanley Hall's monograph Senescence, as child developmentalists do to Hall's founding work in the "child study movement." See: Cole, T. R. (1984). The prophecy of Senescence: G. Stanley Hall and the reconstruction of old age in America. The Gerontologists, 4(24), 360-366.
4. Birren, J. (1961) A brief history of the psychology of aging. The Gerontologist, 1, 69-77.
5. Baltes, P. B., Reese, H. W., & Lipsitt, L. P. (1980). Life-span developmental psychology. Annual Review of Psychology, 31, 65-110.
6. See Harkness, S. (1992). Human development in psychological anthropology. In T. Schwartz, G. M. White, & C. Lutz, C., New Directions for Psychological Anthropology (pp. 102-121). New York: Cambridge University Press.
7. Elder, G. (1974). Children of the great depression. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
8. Greenfield, P. M., & Cocking, R. R. (Eds.) (1994). Cross-cultural roots of minority development. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
9. Elder, G. H., & Rockwell, R. C. (1979). The life course approach and human development: An ecological perspective. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 2, 1-21. LeVine, R. A., Dixon, S., LeVine, S., Richman, A., Leiderman, P. H., Keefer, C. H., & Brazelton, T. B. (1994). Child care and culture: Lessons from Africa. NY Cambridge University Press.
10. Haggerty, R. J., Roghmann, K., & Pless, I. (1975). Child health and the community. New York: Wiley.
11. E.g. Russo, D. C., & Varni, J. W. (1982). Behavioral pediatrics. In D. C. Russo & J. W. Varni (Eds.), Behavioral pediatrics: Research and practice (pp 3-24). New York: Plenum.
12. Anderson, J. E. (1930). Pediatrics and child psychology. Journal of the American Medical Association, 95, 1015-1018.
13. Achenbaum, W. A. (1978). Old age in the new land. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
14. World Health Organization, 1982), Medium term programme, Geneva: WHO, p. 4.
15. Kessel, F. (1992). On culture, health, and human development: Emerging perspectives. Social Science Research Council Items, 46, p 65-72.
16. Society for Research in Child Development (1995). Program of the Bi-Annual Meeting. Ann Arbor, MI: Author.
17. American Psychiatric Association. (1994). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (4th edition). Washington, DC: Author.
18. What programs must offer to be accredited, APA Monitor, November, 1994, p. 42.
19. Evans, J., & Meyers, R. (1994). Child rearing practices: Creating programs where traditions and modern practices meet. Coordinator's Notebook, 15, 1-21.
20. Hamburg, B. A. (1994). President's Report. Annual Report of the William T. Grant Foundation, pp. 8-20. New York: The William T. Grant Foundation.
21. E.g. National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD: Request for Applications for Educational Workshops in Interdisciplinary Research. The University of Connecticut recently received via this mechanism a training grant entitled "Culture, Health, and Human Development" (C. M. Super, PI).
22. Catalogue quotation from Palmer, M. (1981). Decades of Pride. Storrs,Conn.: Parousia Press, p.19.
23. E.g. The Faculty Initiative for Interdisciplinary Expertise at Purdue University.
24. E. g. the three-year-old monthly colloquium series organized by the "Consortium on Child Development," a self-organized group of faculty and graduate students from several departments.

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