Gender Differences in Child Aggression: Relations With Gender‐Differentiated Parenting and Parents’ Gender‐Role Stereotypes

This longitudinal study examines the association between child gender and child aggression via parents’ physical control, moderated by parents’ gender‐role stereotypes in a sample of 299 two‐parent families with a 3‐year‐old child in the Netherlands. Fathers with strong stereotypical gender‐role attitudes and mothers were observed to use more physical control strategies with boys than with girls, whereas fathers with strong counterstereotypical attitudes toward gender roles used more physical control with girls than with boys. Moreover, when fathers had strong attitudes toward gender roles (stereotypical or counterstereotypical), their differential treatment of boys and girls completely accounted for the gender differences in children's aggressive behavior a year later. Mothers’ gender‐differentiated parenting practices were unrelated to gender differences in child aggression.     

Clapping with two hands: Bringing together local and outside knowledge for innovation in land husbandry in Tanzania and Ethiopia ‐ a comparative case study

Abstract

Promoting rural development in Africa involves learning to clap with two hands, that is to say, creating effective interaction between local knowledge and development initiatives, on the one hand, and the knowledge and initiatives of formal agricultural research and extension, on the other. Farmer innovators ‐men and women farmers who take their own initiative to change local agriculture ‐ are key allies in rural development, as shown by the experience of the ISWC programme in Africa. Focusing on Ethiopia and Tanzania, the authors describe how formal research and extension services are made aware of farmers’ innovative work and are encouraged to document the results, promote their spread, and support further development efforts by farmer innovators. A modified Participatory Technology Development (PTD) approach is thus emerging, which starts not with problem analysis but rather by linking up with local problem‐solving initiatives. While the learning process on this approach continues, dialogue has been initiated with policy‐makers with a view to incorporating the approach into regular government extension, research and training activities.     

Narrative inquiry as travel study method: affordances and constraints

This article maps how narrative inquiry—the use of story to study human experience—has been employed as both method and form to capture cross-cultural learning associated with Western doctoral students’ travel study to eastern destinations. While others were the first to employ this method in the travel study domain, we are the first to comprehensively explore the affordances and constraints of the methodology and the possibilities it holds for illuminating knowledge developments, community growth, and identity transformations on the part of participating students. Story fragments illustrating each of these opportunities and challenges are drawn from the China Study Abroad Program, a program sponsored by the University of Houston’s Asian American Studies Center that has been underway since 1995. Affordances of the narrative inquiry research method include such things as detailed accounts of individuals in interaction with diverse people/places/things and explications of stories people live in and by. Accounts, which are “true for now,” as opposed to true for all time and the dangers of human fallibility form two examples of narrative inquiry’s constraints.