Launched in 2008, Parenting Across Cultures (PAC) examines how biological, cultural and familial processes impact child development, self-regulation and risk-taking. The longitudinal study follows a culturally diverse cohort of 1,417 8-year-old boys and girls and their parents across nine countries: China, Colombia, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Philippines, Sweden, Thailand and the United States.
As the original cohort enters adulthood, PAC offers a rare window into how childhood experiences shape long-term outcomes. Below, research team members Dr. Jennifer Lansford and Dr. Ann Skinner provide insight into the study’s scope, challenges and impact.
Q&A with Drs. Lansford and Skinner
What makes the pac study unique?
Our study is the first to follow such a diverse international group of children, mothers, and fathers over a long, developmental time span. This approach has allowed us to understand so much about how experiences in childhood and adolescence shape the well-being of these children as young adults in their mid-20s. We have been interviewing these same families for more than 18 years. Understanding how the parent-child relationship changes over time in different cultural contexts has been a key aspect of our work.
What are some of the challenges that you’ve faced in maintaining this study for nearly two decades?
The biggest challenge with any longitudinal study is usually maintaining engagement and participation from families over such a long period of time. When we began the study, we thought we would be interviewing them for three years, and now we are in our 16th wave of data collection. The research teams in each of our countries work hard to maintain positive relationships with the families in their community so that we can interview as many people as possible each year.
What are some of the key insights that have emerged from the research conducted since the study began in 2008?
One of the insights of our study is that we find more differences between families in the same country than we do between countries. So much of the parenting and “growing up” experience really feels universal, even as culture shapes our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Our study has also allowed us to see how parents and children mutually influence each other – that parenting isn’t only in one direction. Children’s behavior also elicits different types of parenting and affects parents’ well-being.
Duke Sanford produces a tremendous amount of cutting-edge social policy research. Have students been part of the PAC project?
Every semester, two or three Duke students work as Research Assistants on the project, which gives them hands-on experience collecting data from the families and helping to prepare the data for analyses. Students also often come to us with a specific research interest, and together we can help craft that idea into deeper exploration of the topic through an independent study project or honors thesis.
Interdisciplinarity is a strength across Duke. Has the data generated by Parenting Across Cultures been of interest to a wide range of researchers and disciplines?
Parenting Across Cultures has been of interest to researchers from a number of different disciplines, including psychology, sociology, education, pediatrics, and more. In addition, the findings have been used by policymakers in many different ways, such as when our findings were cited when Colombia outlawed corporal punishment as part of their efforts to enhance child protection.
Jennifer Lansford is the director of the Duke Center for Child and Family Policy and the S. Malcolm Gillis Distinguished Research Professor of Public Policy in the Sanford School of Public Policy. Her research focuses on the development of aggression and other behavior problems in youth, with an emphasis on how family and peer contexts contribute to or protect against these outcomes. She examines how experiences with parents (e.g., physical abuse, discipline, divorce) and peers (e.g., rejection, friendships) affect the development of children's behavior problems, how influence operates in adolescent peer groups, and how cultural contexts moderate links between parenting and children's adjustment.
Ann Skinner is a research scientist with the Duke Center for Child and Family Policy. Her research focuses on the ways in which stressful community, familial and interpersonal events impact parent-child relationships and the development of aggression and internalizing behaviors in youth. She has extensive experience in data management of multisite projects and in supervising teams for school- and community-based interventions and data collection.