A comparison of caretaker-child conversations about past personal experiences in Thailand and Australia

This study investigated the conversations between caretakers and children about past personal experiences in Anglo-Australian in comparison with Thai culture. Ten Thai and 10 AngloAustralian caretaker-child dyads were recruited from Bangkok and Sydney. Caretakers were requested to elicit past event narratives from their children, and the three most extended narratives about one topic were selected for analysis. Caretakers’ elicitation strategies and children’s responses were coded into various categories based on McCabe and Peterson (1991), Minami (2002), and Chang (2003). Results revealed that in general Thai conversations about past personal experiences were relatively short and unelaborated in comparison with AngloAustralian dyads. English-speaking caretakers provided more agreement and approval, and they revised and corrected children more than Thai caretakers, whereas Thai caretakers provided more temporal contextual information. Notably, Anglo-Australian caretakers requested more evaluative responses from their children concerning feelings and thoughts about particular incidents than Thai caretakers, which in turn were reflected in the child’s language. In Thai conversation it appears that concise narratives with contextual information are valued.