Uwe P. Gielen & Jaipaul Roopnarine
Allyn & Bacon
This edited reader, with contributions from experts on families in various countries, documents and explains family life and practices throughout the world, including preindustrial, developing, fully industrialized, and postmodern information societies. Each article is organized around a set of similar themes and concerns: socio-historical and demographic information about the families being studied, religious and cultural beliefs tied to family practices, husband-wife/parent roles and responsibilities, parent-child socialization, and policy initiatives within that society. The opening chapters provide a theoretical overview and a basis for examining family changes and organization patterns from evolutionary and postmodern perspectives.
About the Author
Having grown up as an internal refugee in West Germany, Uwe P. Gielen received his Ph.D. in social psychology from Harvard University in 1976, where he completed his dissertation under the guidance of the late Lawrence Kohlberg. He has taught at the City University of New York (1973-1980) and served as chairperson of the Psychology Department of St. Francis College, New York City, from 1980-1990. Presently he is Professor-Emeritus of Psychology and Executive Director of the Institute for International and Cross-Cultural Psychology at St. Francis College.
Dr. Roopnarine is the Pearl S. Falk Professor of Human Development and Family Science. He is research scientist at the Family Development Centre at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago. He served as a consultant to the Roving Caregiver Program, a home-based intervention program implemented in several Caribbean countries to improve the early caregiving environments of young children, and assisted in the revision of the national early childhood curriculum for the government of Guyana. He was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad and Tobago and also an Indo-U.S.-Subcommission professor of psychology at the University of Delhi, India, minority scholar in residence at The Pennsylvania State University, and held visiting appointments at the University of Wisconsin, Cornell University, The City University of New York, and The University of the West Indies in Jamaica.
