The study describes the development of a method for coding and recording the objective non-verbal interactions which take place between preschool-aged children and their mothers. Trained observers speak the codes into one channel of a stereophonic tape recorder while the verbal interactions are simultaneously being recorded on the other channel. Illustrative data from two culturally advantaged and two culturally disadvantaged subject pairs were analyzed in terms of the avenues by which they communicated to demonstrate that the quantitative measures have sufficient consistency on two comparable occasions to warrant applying detailed pattern and sequence analysis techniques.
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