Infancy and Culture: An International Review and Source Book (Reference Books on Family Issues)

Infancy and Culture: An International Review and Source Book provides a cross-indexed, annotated guide to social and behavioral studies of infants of color. Derived from five major data bases of published scientific literature, this volume was designed to elevate the scientific study of infants of color to a level reflecting their majority status in the world's population. While the vast majority of the world's infants are infants of color, a scan of 175 journals only resulted in 386 studies. This crisply underscores the need to intensify studies of cross-culture and within-culture variability, in order to broaden our understanding of the cultural impact on social and behavioral development during the first few years of human life. Infancy and Culture takes a small step in that direction by cataloging the extant literature by geographic region, and by cross-indexing it by topical content. Citations are numbered consecutively throughout the text and both author and subject indexes are pegged to the citation number, not to page numbers, thereby facilitating one's search for all published literature related to a particular topic. Finally, the editors provide a brief summary of the research for each chapter in the volume.