Home Visiting in Two Cultures

ABSTRACT

The home visiting component of early childhood education programs provides an important portal through which to observe family interactions as well as gain insights about the ethnotheories of the home visitor. Home visits were videotaped in the United States and in Turkey to analyze training and program effectiveness. One striking feature of this comparison was the role played by the home visitor in interpreting the cultural values associated with the intervention program. The videos portrayed home visits as cultural windows into intervention priorities. To capture the perspectives represented in the home visit videos, a video-cued multivocal ethnographic method was used to investigate cultural meanings attributed to home visiting practices. Focus groups of Turkish home visitors watched a video from an American home visiting program and focus groups of American home visitors watched a video from Turkish home visiting program. A semistructured set of discussion questions followed the videos, and the group responses were recorded. The resultant thematic analysis revealed culturally informed collections of professional beliefs and expectations. As the focus groups interpreted the practices of professionals from another culture, their comments revealed their own cultural perspectives on the roles to be played by home visitors in the lives of families.

KEYWORDS:

• Cross-cultural development
• early childhood