The study of reciprocal influences through experimental modification of social interaction between functional adult-child pairs

Studies using the Functional Pairs Approach to the study of socialization processes are reviewed, and its strengths and weaknesses are discussed. By staging social encounters between children and biologically unrelated adults, this approach can achieve excellent isolation of causal effects involving a wide range of behaviors. Its main limitation concerns the extent to which the results obtained from staged interactions between unfamiliar children and adults generalize to real parent-child relations. Through careful construction of experimental situations, this limitation can be partially overcome. Ultimately, the choice of a method will depend on several considerations, including the complexity of the behavior to be manipulated and the relative importance of generalizability versus clear isolation of effects. The decisions involved in investigating causal influences between parents and children are summarized in a flow chart.