I guess I wasn't concerned so much about studies of temperament in children until I read Rettew resource for the asynch portion this week. Reading Rettew, I began to feel as if all these people were being evaluated as objects, rather than as subjects.
I think sometimes I'm more likely to pick up on my own tendency to accept generalizations, and make generalizations -- and sometimes less.
My low-level discomfort came up when Rettew was comparing various temperament analyses and the ways those analyses were developed. Part of it was my feeling that there were a fair number of individuals whose lives were sampled, and there was then an amount of analysis and sorting that took place, far away from the eyes of people whose attributes made up data points in the studies.
Another question that came up for me arose from the types of places from which the data was gathered. I remember there was a New Zealand study, some studies from northern European countries, and Rettew mentioned some study work that Rettew's group had done (some of which seemed to originate from VT, and some of which used Chess and Thomas data).
Anyway, I began to wonder about urban versus suburban / rural distinctions, and resource-rich versus resource-poor distinctions. Are there ways in which some of this research may be based on less-than-fully representative samples of human beings?