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In general the research of
infancy has gone through a revolutionary development in the last 40-50
years. The resulting knowledge has dramatically altered the expectations
of infancy and infant behaviour.
The infant is no longer
considered to be a passive human being, who the parents can form and make
as they want to, independently of the infant himself. Today the infant
is considered, from birth, as an individual born with the ability to be
an active partner in interactions. Research of infancy has shown that infants
are born with sensory abilities useable in social situations (Smith, L.
et al., 1993).
Much research concerning
the infant was previously based on descriptions from, for example, records
of diaries and observations, where influences from behaviour, reactions
and acts of other persons, for example the parents, seldom were described
directly in relation to the development of the infant. The two partners,
parent and infant, were described individually as if they were acting quite
independently of each other. Analysis of the patterns of interaction between
normal infants and parents have been focus of research during the last
20 years and this has resulted in emergence of descriptions of how patterns
of interaction normally take place in the stages of early development (Stern,
1985, Schaffer, 1984). We are now aware of the mutual influences the infant
and the parents have on each other. Interactions between infant-parent
dyads are considered to be complex sequences of acts in which both, by
their behaviour, influence the behaviour and reactions of the partner.
Interactions consist of a continuous sequence of acts, where the next act
of an actor has been influenced by the individual or mutual acts that just
took place. In this way the partners have an effect on the behaviour of
each other all the time and thereby on the continuous stream of behavioural
acts.
When we look at interactions
between blind infants and their parents very little research has been made.
Also in this area most research has been made as observations, descriptions
of experiences from the "real" world or as narrative reports. (Burlingham,
1965, Fraiberg, 1977, Preisler, 1991, Preisler et al., 1984, 1987, Urwin,
1978, 1983, Wills, 1979, 1979).
Many questions about blindness
and its effects on the behaviour and daily life of an infant were discussed
during the sixties and seventies. Several articles did not contain precisely
scientific research. Often the articles were influenced by a psychoanalytic
view of some of the authors and personal development thereby took a central
place. Since a considerable number of blind children developed social-emotional
difficulties like difficulties known from autistic children, the question
was raised if blind children had a risk of developing autistic behaviour
or other social disturbances because of the missing vision (Fraiberg, 1977,
Burlingham, 1979).
These discussions are still
going on. They are reinforced by the experiences we have in Denmark, where
integration in nurseries, kindergartens and later in school has shown that
especially the social part of integration for some blind children is difficult
to cope with. This ongoing discussion is one of the reasons why the project
was started.
The importance of the visual
capacity in the pre-verbal phase.
Many researches concerning
interaction of sighted children have found vision to be an essential component
in the interactions (Brazelton, T.B. et al., 1979, Schaffer H.R. et al.,
1977). The vision is from the first moments of life (Klaus, M. et al.,
1982), used for example, in creating emotional bonds between infant and
parents. Parents and infants use much of their time together in the early
stages of interaction to establish emotional bonds between them. (Stern,
1985, Schaffer, 1984).
Vision is also used actively
in the early stages of interaction as an important mean to regulate the
interactions concerning content, duration and intensity (Schaffer, H.R.,
1984, H. Als, 1982, H. Als et al., 1980)
The infants' use of vision
in interactions with their parents is especially important at these early
stages of development, where the infants' control and regulation of verbal
and motoric acts are still undeveloped. During these early stages of interaction
the parents are often seen to be intuitively attentive to their infant's
use of vision and to react accordingly to this. (Brazelton et al., 1974,
Stern, 1974)
During the early stages,
vision is also a mean used by the infant to show what is the focus of his
attention at a given moment. This behaviour helps the parents to follow
the interests of their infant and to use his interests actively as part
of the interactions and, through this help, in regulating both the content
and the course of an ongoing interaction. In this manner for example, the
possibilities to maintain the infants' attention for longer time is increased
(H. Als, 1982).
The development of mutual
attentive behaviour and the cognitive comprehension of this is, to a large
extent, established by the help of vision. Parents of sighted infants co-orientate
their vision with the infant by help of the direction of the vision of
their infants. By doing so they know what their infant is interested in
at a given moment. Sighted infant uses vision to ensure that this co-orientating
takes place (Collis, 1977). Through the help of experiences like this,
the sighted infant is gradually developing the knowledge that both partners
are attentive to the same object and, in doing so, have reached to a state
of mutual attention.
In the pre-verbal phase,
vision is also used in developing the pointing gestures of infants. When
a sighted infant starts to point, combined with the use of his sight, this
gesture develops to a mean that enables the infant to show more precisely
the focus of his attention. (Murphy et al., 1977). By looking at the acts
of his parents the infant can be certain that the parents understand his
gesture. When a sighted infant first by eye-pointing and later by a combination
of eye-pointing and pointing with his hand, experiences that his wishes
are understood by his parents, an important basis has been made for developing
language and more advanced communicative skills.
Through the use of sight,
the sighted infant is also able to collect affective information from parents
and others. This information helps the infant to evaluate the safety of
a situation (Campos, 1981). Social referencing is a help in developing
a secure emotional basis for the infant in relation to activities in his
surroundings.
Vision is part of many other
activities that also influence the interactions. For example in imitation,
recognition of distant objects and persons, where tactile and auditory
impressions are not available, the loss of many visual stimuli to evoke
and stimulate curiosity and locomotion. Much information is given spontaneously
and quickly by help of vision. In the area of communication vision plays
an important role too, in eye-contact, and as an effective signal in turn-taking
among others.
We are able to imagine how
it is to be without visual stimuli, but only through careful observations
of blind infants interacting at early stages with their parents, are we
able to get an answer to how the loss of vision affects the behaviour and
development of blind infants.
What do we know until now
about the potential influence of blindness?
Fraiberg (1977) wanted to
know, why so many of her blind children had developed patterns of autistic
behaviour. Kekelis et al. (1996) questioned why blind children have difficulties
in being integrated and socially adapted into the world of sighted peers
and proposed that the blind have difficulties in establishing a verbal
dialogue. Als et al. (1980, 1982) has shown different patterns in interaction
in the earliest stages of life in a blind infant-parent dyad compared to
a dyad with a sighted infant-parent. Urwin (1983) wondered what influences
the loss of visual capacities means in the pre-verbal phase . She found
that her children did not develop indicative pointing or made gestures
of demands such as reaching. This resulted in a delay of making requests.
Preisler (1993) found the same absence of gestures.
Preisler (Preisler, 1991,
Preisler et al., 1986) has shown that the communication between mothers
and blind infants are very much alike the comparable interaction for sighted
children and their mothers. Even if Preisler pointed out some minor differences
and difficulties, she stressed that the mothers of blind children are very
competent in handling their children and she pointed to ways in which the
mothers found alternate paths for communication. Later on Preisler (1993)
also concluded that higher demands are put on caregivers of blind infants,
and that the missing vision diminishes the blind infant's opportunities
to learn and understand interpersonal rules in communication. In my practical
work I find that many blind children have difficulties in being socially
integrated.
What are the reasons behind
this?
The more technical parts
of language development are managed well by many blind children. In several
ways they match the sighted infants and children here. (Kekelis, 1996).
But what do we know about their communicative skills from the early developmental
stages?
We need more information
about what is really going on between a blind infant and his parents in
early interactions. Is the vision really so important in interactions at
early stages, or are blind infants and their parents able to compensate
and interact in another way than sighted infants and their parents?
This project was started
in the hope of finding answers to these questions and through this attains
more knowledge about the patterns of interaction between blind infants
in the early stages of development and their parents, which afterwards
could be used in programs of early intervention.
The project.
The aim of the project is
to analyse patterns of interaction in blind infant-parent dyads and compare
these with the similar patterns of interaction in sighted infant-parents
dyads. The aim is also to find potential similarities, differences and
development in patterns in the respective dyads. The essential focus is
on the pre-verbal developmental phase.
The infants in the project
consist of a birth cohort of blind infants, ten prematurely born infants,
diagnosed with premature rethinopathy. Because of development of additional
disabilities the infants in the project divided themselves into smaller
groups. Five infants are barely blind, two infants are blind, mentally
retarded and show difficulties in developing a verbal language, while three
infants are blind, mentally retarded and have cerebral palsy. Three sighted
premature children and three full- term infants were followed in the same
manner as the blind infants.
Procedure.
The project is based on
video-recordings of parents playing with their infants in their homes.
The homes were chosen as a place for recording to ensure that both infants
and parents had a secure basis for their being together. Well-known toys
of the infants could be part of the situation if infant or parent wanted
it. No instructions were given about the content or the course of the interactions.
The parents were asked to play with their infant as they normally would
do it. It was the goal to visit every family once a month, but because
of practical reasons this was not practicable, but an attempt was made
to come as close as possible to this interval. The youngest infants were
8 months at the first recording and the eldest was 27 months old, when
the last video-recording was made. An evaluation of the development of
the infant was made at every visit. This makes it is possible to compare
the infants in relation to developmental age instead of chronological age.
The developmental ages of the infants are between 3 to 36 months with most
recordings in the age period between 9 to 24 months.
Eighty-eight videotapes
were recorded. Each recording has a duration of 15-30 minutes. All tapes
were viewed and an episode was chosen from each tape for a microanalysis.
The duration of an episode varies from about 1 minute to about four minutes
depending of when an episodic topic starts and ends. Sequences concerning
play with an object were preferred, but if no such sequence was available
an episode with motoric activities was chosen instead.
When an episode was identified
for the microanalysis, the acts of infant and parent in each dyad were
transcript according to selected categories. The list of categories consists
of thirty groups of variables. Fourteen groups of variables include categories
involving acts, sixteen groups of variables include more descriptive categories.
Totally 150 values were used. The values and variables were chosen to fit
into a computer-program, Theme, which are used to analyse the data.
The tapes were viewed several
times. First all sounds were registered: vocalisations, verbal sounds and
phrases. Afterwards the infant and the parent were registered separately.
The motoric behaviour was then registered, for example movements of face,
body and hands, how infants and parents manipulate toys, movement of reaching
and contacting and affective expressions among others. Eighty-eight behaviour
records were made in this manner based on the original video recordings.
The applied time unit was 1/10 second. The last thing was to make an evaluation
of the attentive behaviour of both infant and parent.
The methods:
The final and still ongoing
phase of the project is to analyse the data by help of two different methods.
g (1991) has developed a method to analyse dialogues. In processing the
data I use a method Julie Feilberg (1991) has developed to analyse dialogues.
Julie Feilberg worked with sighted dyads and were especially
concerned about how the
dialogues between infant and parent took place. I have enlarged her method
and also included an analysis of monologues. In this way I am able to analyse
the continuous sequences of acts in the interactions.
All acts or chains of acts
are evaluated as initiatives or responses. An initiative is an act pointing
forwards in the dialogue. The initiatives are acts with potential influence
on the future. A response is a reaction to an utterance that just took
place or took place a short moment before. A response points backward,
but sometimes a response can be both a response (pointing backwards) and
an initiative (pointing forwards). A dialogue is established when a chain
of acts is established in which both partners participate. Each partner
can perform a chain of acts individually without any interruption from
the partner. This is called a monologue.
When a new focus emerges,
the initiative, which starts it, is called a global initiative. A global
initiative presents a new focus in the interaction and it has potential
thematically consequences for the next utterances associated to this new
focus.
A registration of the verbal
acts was made accordingly to their functional meaning as attention catchers,
having a commentary function or was a dismissive reaction. Also the types
of the verbal utterance were registered as for example, comment, questions,
information, etc.
The principles of interaction
analysis are used in the computer-program Theme (Magnusson, 1993, 1996).
Interaction analysis is a relatively new method starting after the sound
movies were available. The interaction analysis is created at anthropologically
principles combined with a research method known from structural linguistic
and considerations from cybernetics. (Kendon, 1990, Jordan et al., 1992.).
Careful analysis of human
behaviour has shown, that human behaviour consists of recurrent patterns
in individuals as well as in cultural encounters (Kendon, 1990). It is
this principle of recurrent events in human behaviour that are used in
the computer-program Theme. (Magnus Magnusson, 1993, 1996). By help of
Theme it is possible to find patterns of interaction repeated over time.
Subsequently these detected patterns of interaction are going to be analysed.
Results:
Because of limits of time
of this presentation and because I am still working on processing the data
I will concentrate on some of the preliminary results concerning the group
of blind infants and the group of the sighted infants. The conclusions
given here are preliminary, because the project is not finished.
Short considerations concerning
following themes will be given at the conference: An analysis concerning
respectively the group of blind and sighted infants of who takes the initiatives
to start a dialogue, how the initiatives start, are maintained and closed.
Problems in evaluating focus of attention will be shortly be described
if time permits it.
The future:
I hope a project as the
one described can bring our knowledge a little bit forward.
Much has been written in
accordance with a narrative tradition of experiences from practical work.
Still we need more knowledge to be able to clearly point out, what strengthens
development positively and what has a negative effect. We still have a
long way to go scientifically, before we clearly can pinpoint those elements.
Our exact knowledge in this area is still too small.
We often work with small
groups in research, but there is a growing tendency that qualitative research
is accepted throughout the world. It is more and more accepted that results
can be built on small samples and still have a "scientific" dimension.
Careful analysis of small samples can have great value. This has made research
possible in our field. Many of the observations from research on sighted
infants have also been built on small groups, but when more and more samples
from different places give similar results, hypotheses slowly become more
plausible. This is how we often have to work, and this is why the interchange
of information, experience and research results is so important across
countries and frontiers, and makes a conference like this desirable and
crucial.
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Anette Ingsholt
Refsnaesskolen
National Institute for Blind
and Partially Sighted Children and Youth in Denmark
Kystvejen 112
4400 Kalundborg
Denmark
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E-mail: anette.ingsholt@vip.cybercity.dk
(Home)
Refsnaes@inet.uni-c.dk (Work)
th , July, 1997
9th July, 1997
Ms. Brandi Furry
ICEVI 10th World Conference
Overbrook School for the
Blind
6333 Malvern Avenue
Philadelphia, PA 19151-2597
USA
Workshop paper by Anette Ingsholt, Refsnaesskolen, National Institute for Blind and Partially Sighted Children and Youth, Kystvejen 112, DK-4400 Kalundborg, Denmark.