Mission

Our Mission

We study the development of children within their cultural contexts. Our approach is to bring together researchers from diverse disciplinary and geographical backgrounds to form collaborative teams with complementary expertise.

Guiding Principles

  • We start with the premise that human social behaviour is simultaneously shaped by evolved dispositions and their development in an individual embedded in a particular cultural-historical environment.
  • We believe that an interdisciplinary approach is necessary to answer questions about the psychological and sociocultural processes which lead to the enormous diversity in human societies.
  • Our aim is to bring together exploratory and systematic approaches to studying child development in cultural contexts. We are open to novel and experimental interdisciplinary approaches, with the aim of producing new insights and good practices in this emerging field.
  • Our members subscribe to a team approach where all members are committed to sharing methods as well as data to create collaborative research projects and co-author the resulting publications. Authorship is determined based upon contribution, defined as participating in the design, data collection, analysis, or write-up of an empirical project.
  • We are committed to Open Science practices (such as pre-registration, data and code sharing) that recognize the diversity of practices across disciplines.
  • We are committed to ethical research and follow procedures and guidelines of home institutions and local laws. We strive for practices that enable capacity-building and benefit-sharing at the local level, including knowledge-exchange and collaboration with local researchers and practitioners.
  • We promote gender equality at the workplace and at conferences, as defined here.
  • We are committed to fostering a safe work environment that prohibits discrimination based upon race, ethnicity, immigration status, nationality, social class, religion (or lack thereof), gender, gender identity, age, sexual orientation, disability, career status, or political ideology.
  • We also prohibit sexual misconduct: harassment, domestic and dating violence, sexual assault, and stalking.
  • We are dedicated to providing training opportunities and mentoring for project members at every career stage.
  • Our policies are always evolving to adapt to emergent, scientific, ethical, and other issues as they arise in our research and that of others in this field. We are committed to protecting the rights, safety and well-being of both participants and researchers. To that end, our members are currently working on draft policies that will be made available for comment.