My current work focuses on how children
and adolescents come to understand and make sense of conflicts-especially conflicts in which one or both parties feel
hurt or mistreated-and how their unique and subjective interpretations of these experiences affect their actual
interpersonal interactions and further their moral development. I have studied this process by interviewing children at
length about hypothetical conflict situations (Shaw & Wainryb, 2006;
Wainryb, Shaw, Langley, Cottam & Lewis, 2004) and,
more recently, by eliciting children's narrative accounts of their own experiences
Wainryb, Brehl, & Matwin, 2005- http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/toc/mono/70/3).
Currently, I am beginning to also look
at how these construals emerge and change in the context of actual conversations with parents and peers in collaboration with Monisha Pasupathi
(http://www.psych.utah.edu/people/faculty/pasupathi/index.php).
Of course, the experiences children are making sense of vary in many ways. Recently I have begun to examine children whose social
and interpersonal experiences are less normative and involve extreme violence, including child soldiers, children displaced by war,
and children living in violent communities (Wainryb & Pasupathi, 2007a;
2007b; Posada & Wainryb, under review; Wainryb & Posada, 2007).
As I take a developmental perspective on these questions, I also consider possible developmental constraints that might operate on
children's understandings of their social experiences. For example, how do 3-year-olds, as compared to 10- or 15-year-olds, make sense
of conflict situations in which they are directly involved? How do differences in their social-cognitive abilities and theories-of-mind
affect their understandings? (Wainryb & Brehl, 2006).
Every time someone makes sense of their experiences with conflict, they engage in negotiations with their culture's available frameworks
for interpretation. I have written extensively, from a developmental point of view, against the individualism/collectivism distinction.
In my view, that sort of characterization of culture conceals the varied experiences of individuals within cultures, ignores systems of
inequality within societies, overestimates the power of culture to dictate meaning, and underestimates the ability of individuals
(including children) to make sense of their own experiences. In the research I have conducted in the Middle-East and South-America, I have
advocated a shift away from a focus on the cultural patterning of development to a focus on the diverse experiences of persons within their
cultures. Such a focus, in my view, acknowledges that cultures are made up of individuals who reflect on their culture's values and traditions,
accepting some and rejecting others. It also acknowledges that the ways in which people make sense of their culture's values and traditions are
seriously impacted by the power inequalities that are part of most cultures (
Wainryb, 2006)
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