The acts and conditions of the caregiving environment

In this response to McCartney and Black (1995), the point is made that our purpose in presenting the two-tiered approach to classifying the acts and conditions of caregiving was to offer a framework that was more in keeping with current ecological developmental theories than most other approaches to measuring or classifying the elements of caregiving. Their idea of constructing a system that could reliably capture all the dynamic features of transactions, including a child′s subjective responses, although laudatory, seems very difficult to achieve. Thus, the proposed approach focuses on an objective system of classification that moves in the direction of capturing the dynamics of transactions while still meeting scientific criteria for reliable placement into categories. The argument is made that scientifically useful descriptions of caregiving environments can be attained using a systematic, objective approach to classifying acts and conditions of the environment even while recognizing that all children do not respond the same to those acts and conditions.