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Diana Baumrind

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Diana Blumberg Baumrind is a clinical and developmental psychologist that specializes in parenting styles. Baumrind was born on August 23, 1927 in a small Jewish community in New York City; she was the first of two daughters born to Hyman and Mollie Blumberg. Baumrind earned a B.A. in philosophy at Hunter College in 1948. She later received her M.A. and Ph. D. in Psychology at the University of California, Berkley; she studied developmental, clinical, and social psychology. Her doctoral dissertation was entitled “Some personality and situational determinants of behavior in a discussion group” Baumrind completed a clinical residency at the Cowell Memorial Hospital/Kaiser Permanente and was a fellow under the NIMH grant investigating …show more content…

The teaching of Egon Brunswik who impressed upon her the importance of idiographic research also influenced her. The conformity research of Krech and Crutchfield also influenced her (Kurtines, 1992). Each of these different influences can be seen through different research projects and works of Diana Baumrind. Baumrind utilized something she learned from each of her influences to become the amazing psychologist she is today. Baumrind’s work on parenting styles is probably her most famous and important research. Back in the early 1960s, Baumrind conducted her famous childcare research. In her stuffy she and her research team followed more than 100 middle class children of preschool-age Baumrind’s primary research methods were interviews and observation. The aim of her child parent behavior study was to formulate and evaluate the effect of most typical Western parenting styles. The three parenting styles studied were the authoritarian parenting style, the permissive parenting style, and the authoritative parenting style. Her findings were ground breaking and the time and have since been subject to both academic acclaim and criticism. In her study Baumrind used two aspects of parenting to evaluate and from her data the 3 parenting styles were defined in relation to those two elements. The two elements that she evaluated were parental responsiveness vs. parental unresponsiveness and parental demandingness vs. parenting

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