PATTERNS OF PARENT BEHAVIOUR IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AND THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY: A CROSS-NATIONAL COMPARISON.

Cross-national comparisons represent for the social scientist a combination of challenging opportunities and of tricky methodological pitfalls. The opportunities lie in the chance such comparisons provide of shaking hypotheses free from particular sets of cultural entanglements and for catching strategic variables in new ranges and combinations. The pitfalls lie not only in the problems to be faced in the cross-national translation of variables, but also in the fact that most such comparisons involve the reconciliation of basically non-comparable data, gathered by diverse investigators with diverse methods and for diverse purposes. The present paper deals with a set of data which permit some direct cross-national comparisons of child-rearing practices in the United States and the Federal Republic of Germany. The data for both samples were collected by the same investigators, employing nearly identical methods and procedures, and the subjects employed in the comparisons have been carefully matched with respect to a number of possibly contaminating demographic variables.