Child development studies in India

PART OF the excitement in studying child-development partitularly
in recent years in India, stems from the tact that, the tield-is under
going a period of unprecedented growth. Child development as
an applied and independent discipline is recent. The disciplines
like Psychology. Pacdiatrics, Education, Social Work, Home
Science, Psychiatry and Sociology, all contribute to understand thhe
child. Child development draws knowledge from these disciplines.
The task of preparing annotations of the studies was undertaken
(1) to find out the trends and identify the gaps in researches in
child development; (ii) to provide perspective for future research;
and (iii) to make readily available a set of researches to students,
teachers and researchers oI child development.
Researches were collected from various journals, books and

mimeographed research reports. Questionnaires were also mailed
to various teaching and research institutions having the depart-
ments of Child Development, Home Science, Psychology, Education
and to some of the professionals working with these and other
departments who are actively engaged in research in child
development.

A few of the annotations are reproduced as submitted by the
authors as we did not have access to their detailed report. The
research studies included in this document are mostly those
which were published/mimeographed in the seventies. Thus,
by and large the compilation is of a decade, however, it is not
exhaustive. It may provide a spectrum of the work in the field of
child development. Masters' dissertations were excluded in
compilation as generally they are part of the research training for
the students. An overview of the trends of studies on child

development is also given. It is based on the annotations of the
studies included in this volume.
A total of 203 studies were collected. These
three broad sections. T he three sections are (a dinto
(b) Aspects of Development and (c) Studies on Childeon
Special Needs. The classitication ot study in a particular ce
is arbitrary to the extent that wherever it was found relat
more suitable it was included. Cross-entries are not given, Authors
index is given in alphabetical order
Each abstract gives a briet note on the purpOse of the study
the sample studied, the method and tools used for data collection
and the results. All the findings of the study have not been given
Only major findings from the point of view of child developmens

elatively

are mentioned.

Our sincere thanks are due to all those institutions and

researchers who have responded to our questionnaire and to
the Staff of the Library of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences
for helping us locate the materials in the library and getting the
books and periodicals from other libraries situated in Bombay
We express our gratitude to Mrs. Ranjan Amin and Dr. S. V.
Kale for giving their valuable comments on the earlier version
of the manuscript.
We are grateful to our Director Dr. (Miss) Armaity S. Desai
for her full cooperation in bringing out this document and to
Our earlier Director, Dr. M. S. Gore for his encouragement m
initiating this work.
Thanks are also merited by Mrs. Manjit Kaur Gupta anu
Mr. Nirmal Kumar Thakur, who typed the manuseript