Gunderson et al. (2013) Parent Praise to 1 to 3 Year olds

• Background:

  Research has shown that the way parents raise their children impacts the child's later ideas about reasons for behaviours/beliefs, e.g. if praising in a child on their effort rather than their ability, this can lead to a framework that working hard can cause success. Gunderson wanted to see if this was the case in natural settings, as well as in experiments.
• Person Praise

  Praising somebody's character and leads to a child developing frameworks that they are born with or without an ability,

  Person Praise will lead to a fixed mindset. This is all known as entity framework.
• Fixed Mindset

  Our ability is fixed, we are born good or bad at something and this cannot be changed.
• Process Praise

  Praising somebody's effort or work put into a skill. This will lead to a framework believing ability is changeable - a growth mindset. This also leads to incremental theory.
• Growth Mindset

  Our ability can improve through hard work and effort.

  e.g. I failed my maths test, I need to study more for the next one!
• Aim of Gunderson

  Gunderson aimed to investigate whether children are affected by parent praise.

  Gunderson aimed to investigate whether parents give girls more person praise and boys more process praise.
• Procedure of Gunderson

  A sample of 29 boys and 24 girls was used from Chicago, USA, from a variety of cultural backgrounds.

  LONGITUDINAL STUDY: The researches followed the sample of a long period of time. They looked at parental praise when the child was: 14 months, 26 months and 38 months. After 5 years, they measured children's ideas about cause of behaviour.
• Results

  Of the Praise, 18% was process and 16% was person (the other 66% was another type of praise)

  24.4% of boys received process praise and 10.3% of girls received process praise.

  The more process praise given in early childhood , the more likely the child was to have an incremental motivational framework (GROWTH) when 7 years old.
• Conclusion

  The Parents' use of process praise positively correlates with a child later use of an incremental motivational framework (GROWTH)

  They did NOT find evidence that parent's use of person praise led to a child's later use of an entity motivational framework (FIXED)
• Two strengths of Gunderson et al

  (+) Validity - The two questionnaires given to the children about intelligence was standardised

  (+) Generalisability - Used Participants from diverse ethnic backgrounds in the sample.
• Two weaknesses of Gunderson et al

  (-) The sample is very small at 53 people so the generalisability is limited.

  (-) Parents knew they they were being observed (covert observation) by videotape so they could have changed their behaviours. For example, they may have gave their child a lot of praise to try to be seen as a "good parent" so it lacks ecological validity.