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| This is a chronology of research on parents, children, war, and peace conducted by the researchers directly connected to Purple Wagon. 1989: Mothers and Fathers Describe War and Peace to Their Sons and Daughters We began our research on this topic in 1989 with an exploratory study of parents using a paper-and-pencil questionnaire containing a combination of open- and closed-ended questions regarding the parents' attitudes and experiences connected to talking with their children about war and peace, resulting in presentations and one publication (Myers-Walls, 1990; Myers-Walls et al., 1993; Pelo, Myers-Walls, & Myers-Bowman, 1990). Our data were collected during a time when there was comparatively little reference to political violence in U.S. media and daily discourse. We included parents from a historic peace church, a local Presbyterian congregation, a childcare center near a military base and a summer program for children. Seventy-one parents of children aged 3 to 13 participated. The parents responded to open-ended questions asking what they would say to one of their children if s/he asked them “What is war?” and “What is peace?” They also reported their attitudes about war and peace using an early version of our Likert-style parental attitudes scale. This study included a combination of qualitative and quantitative analyses (see Myers-Walls et al., 1993). First, we used qualitative techniques to identify themes in the war and peace answers. Each participant's response was then coded indicating the presence or absence of each of the 10 themes. Using nonparametric tests, we compared parents' answers regarding war with those regarding peace and contrasted mothers' and fathers' answers. There were notable differences between the ways that mothers and fathers reported approaching these issues with their sons and daughters. The quantitative analysis of the attitude scale showed, among other findings, that parents from the historic peace churches reported significantly different attitudes when compared to military parents. This was the first study exploring parents' attitudes and conversations regarding these topics. Some of the themes identified in the parents' answers closely paralleled the findings of earlier studies with children. We identified that the critical next step was to include parents and children in the same study for comparison. 1991: Children's and Parents' Perceptions of War The beginning of the first Persian Gulf War in 1991 was a dramatic media event in the U.S. The pervasiveness of the media coverage convinced us that we should gather data from both children and parents to assess their reactions to and communication about the conflict. Because we were responding to a current event, we moved quickly and without outside funding, basing the questionnaires and interview format on our earlier work, the work of others, and on the flurry of media reports focused on children's reactions to the war. Approximately five to eight months after the end of the ground war, face-to-face interviews were conducted in Indiana and surrounding states with 46 children (22 boys and 24 girls) from 3 to 11 years of age. Children also drew pictures of war and peace. Paper-and-pencil questionnaires were completed by 39 parents (28 mothers and 11 fathers) who were matched with 31 of the children. This study served as a pilot of interviewing children and using their drawings of war and peace and helped us begin to understand children's definitions of the terms. Over the course of the study the wording of questions was refined and improved, and the need to structure the process for drawing pictures became clear. Although the study's primary benefits were in the development and refinement of methodologies and analysis, reports from this study were delivered at several conferences and symposia (Myers-Walls, 1991, 1992, 1995; Myers-Walls & Myers-Bowman, 1995). In addition to asking children and parents about war and peace in general, we also asked questions about Operation Desert Storm. The results confirmed that 85% of the children knew something about the war. It also was clear that the nature of the political violence and its media coverage influenced children's responses; children's concepts of this war tended to be abstract and impersonal. For example, when children talked about war in general, 88% mentioned fighting; however, when talking about Operation Desert Storm, only 36% mentioned fighting. When talking about war in general, 71% mentioned that people die and get killed, while only 21% mentioned that aspect of Desert Storm. We interpreted this finding to be reflective of both the nature of the war and the nature of media coverage of the conflict. When children were asked how they reacted to the war, the most common reaction reported by the children (65%) was fear. Fear also was the most common reaction parents identified in their children, but at a lower frequency. The second most common response by the children was sadness. That response was not mentioned by the parents. The low congruence between parent and child reports of the child's response provided strong support for research designs that included both children and parents in subsequent studies. Many of the analyses in this study were based on group contrasts because of a low number of direct parent-child matches. We were struck by the relative lack of congruence between parent and child reports about the children's reaction to the war. 1999/2000: Parents and Children in U.S. and Serbia Describe War and Peace The next wave of data collection began with the NATO bombing of Belgrade, Yugoslavia in connection with the Kosovo crisis. We collected data in the U.S. and invited a colleague in Belgrade to do so in her country. Because Yugoslavia was at war, we obtained a “grant in aid” from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues to support the Belgrade data collection. Many authors have mentioned the difficulties with collecting data in a war zone, but we with our partners were able to conduct interviews with 50 children aged 6 to 12 and 50 parents. Our partners also transcribed and translated the interviews. At the same time, data were collected in Indiana and Kansas with 56 children aged 3 to 12 and with 24 parents. This provided us with a unique opportunity to examine the reactions of children and parents on two sides of an international conflict. This data set has resulted in a number of presentations (Myers-Bowman, Myers-Walls, & Walker, 1999; Myers-Bowman, Walker, & Myers-Walls, 2000; Myers-Walls, Myers-Bowman, Walker, & Khosravi, 2000; Walker, Myers-Bowman, & Myers-Walls, 2001; Myers-Bowman, Walker, & Myers-Walls, 2002), one dissertation (Walker, 2002), and several publications (Myers-Bowman, Walker, & Myers-Walls, 2003, 2004, 2005; Walker, Myers-Bowman, & Myers-Walls, 2003). We identified themes that were shared vs. those that were unique when comparing children and parents from Belgrade and the U.S., once again confirming that levels of exposure to political violence seem to influence responses. For example, we noted that parents from both countries mentioned killing when talking about war, but only the parents from Belgrade mentioned destruction, attacking, defending, and how hard it was to talk with children about war. Only U.S. parents, on the other hand, mentioned that obtaining freedom is a reason for war. Regarding peace, both children and parents from Belgrade mentioned that peace meant living a normal life—a description that did not appear in U.S. participants' descriptions The unique parent themes from the U.S. included alternatives to fighting, a focus on working out problems, and respect/love/dignity. These themes may have been associated with the fact that U.S. parents could deal with the issues hypothetically and idealistically. In a similar way, the children from the U.S. included “fun” in their descriptions of peace, while Belgrade children did not. We also compared children's and parents' answers from the same country and found contrasts that appeared to be related to roles and developmental status. This method of comparison of shared and unique themes in different groups was a very helpful method for uncovering relationships and trends using qualitative analyses. These results confirmed the need to use qualitative methods in order to tap into unexpected perceptions and to examine the potential impact of war/political violence. Also, we confirmed the importance of including both parents and children in studies and examining a broad age range of children. Although drawings in this dataset were available only from the children in the U.S. , Kathy Walker, an art therapist and family scientist who is also involved in the proposed project, led us in interpreting those data in this study (Walker, et al., 2003). Her analysis of the drawings confirmed that children had more concrete ideas of war than peace (by including more objects and figures and filling more space). It also showed that some ideas appeared through drawings that did not emerge when children were interviewed, such as images of fantasy and symbols. Children's drawings also did not always represent expected developmental stages based on the child's chronological age, supporting the idea of horizontal décalage in development (Ålvik,1968; Piaget, 1932) and the need to identify stages of development of understanding of these particular concepts. New insights regarding data collection techniques also were gained through the use of interviews with the parents in Belgrade. This encouraged us to consider using that approach in future studies. The primary qualitative analyses--contrasts between children and parents experiencing different levels of political violence—clarified important issues and sensitized us to new topics in the participants' conceptualizations. 2001/2002: U.S. Parents and Children React to 9/11 The attacks of September 11, 2001 in the U.S. again inspired the data-collection process, using the same basic methodology, but this time including questions about terrorism/terrorists and the events of 9/11. Data were collected primarily in Indiana , Kansas and Idaho from 60 children ages 3 to 17 and 25 parents. We increased the age range to get a broader picture, and we also sought out Muslim families because of the heavy emphasis on the Muslim faith and culture after the attacks. Presentations from this dataset and on this topic (Deng & Myers-Bowman, 2003; Garbarino, Myers-Walls, Orthner, & Rosenblatt, 2001; Khosravi, Myers-Walls, Walker, & Myers-Bowman, 2002; Khosravi & Myers-Walls, 2003) have focused on the unique features of children's responses since the attacks, their understanding of terrorism, and similarities and differences in the answers of children from different religious heritages—Islam, peace churches (Church of the Brethren, Mennonite, and Quaker), and “other” (non-Muslim/non-peace church) backgrounds. After the attacks there was a steep increase in interest regarding our work. A web site was created giving recommendations to parents and teachers for talking with their children about terrorism, war, and peace (www.ces.purdue.edu/terrorism ). One question we examined in this study was whether the parents and children had discussed war and peace. When we matched parents and children in this post-9/11 wave of data collection, we discovered there was only a 63% rate of agreement between their reports of whether they had ever discussed war or peace. Again, the need to gather data directly from both parents and children rather than depending on one group to report on their communication was clear. A number of parents responded to questions in ways that sounded similar to the Belgrade parents' answers of a few years before; they talked about how difficult it was to explain the attacks and how disruptive the attacks were, even though they were not directly involved. Some responses, therefore, seemed to be related to levels of exposure to political violence and feelings of victimization or vulnerability. Analysis continues on this dataset.  Second-Generation Studies Our work is now spawning second-generation studies directed by current and former graduate students who are interested in carrying on this work. The next three studies represent such projects. Comparing Taiwanese-American and Non-Taiwanese Children's Descriptions of War A Taiwanese doctoral student at Kansas State University conducted her dissertation research using data from 50 children between the ages of 3 and 18 to examine the similarities and differences in Taiwanese American (TA) and Non Taiwanese American (NTA) children's understandings of war (Deng, 2003). Twenty-three of these children were second-generation Taiwanese American (TA). The other 17 participants had varied ethnic backgrounds with no Asian heritage (NTA). Overall, TA and NTA children's and adolescents' descriptions of war were very similar to each others'. However, some variations between TA and NTA answers included more emphasis on aggressive attacks, less emphasis on negative emotions and a less negative judgment of war expressed by the TA than NTA participants. This was the first investigation of which we are aware that included an examination of Asian children's war/political violence conceptions. This is a population that needs further investigation. Middle-School U.S. Youth Use Moral Development Concepts When Describing War and Peace Another graduate student completed a dissertation at Kansas State University by gathering data from 14 eighth-grade young people attending a private Catholic school in a large Midwestern city (Lash, 2004). She specifically examined the care and justice considerations represented in the teens' descriptions of war and peace as conceptualized in the field of moral development (Gilligan, 1980; 1988; Kohlberg, 1984; Noddings, 1984). A vast majority of the adolescents included care considerations in their descriptions of peace, but half of the teens also included care considerations in their war descriptions. Justice concepts also could be identified in both war and peace answers. From this investigation we learned that early adolescents have well-established conceptualizations of peace and war and that they apply considerations of both justice and care to their cognitive understandings. 2003: Data Collection in Korea Two Korean graduate students at Purdue University collected data from 50 children and 59 parents in Korea. Data have been transcribed and translated to English. Data analysis is beginning. Quantitative Analysis of Parent Attitudes Using the post-9/11 dataset, a graduate student at Purdue University has analyzed the properties of the parent attitude scale (Frias, Myers-Walls, & Khosravi, 2004). A test of internal reliability of all 13 items in the scale resulted in a Cronbach's alpha of .863, indicating high internal consistency. A factor analysis also identified four factors, which we described as (1) war is not a good solution to international problems, (2) war and taking lives are not justified, (3) a nuclear/large-scale war will not happen in my or my children's lifetime, and (4) disagreement with US military action against terrorism. Additional analyses of the scale's properties continue using data collected at several times.  |
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