Pilot Projects
CCI will undertake pilot projects that will test the CMRP guidelines and facilitate replication:
Child rearing practices:
Jerome Kagan and Costa Rican psychiatrist Luis Diego Herrera have designed a research project that will assess the feasibility of teaching the mothers of two-year-old children how to nurture progressive values in their children. Two groups of mothers, selected to assure similarity of class, education, and age, will receive training over a two-year period, one in parenting, the other, as a control group, in cooking. Their children will be assessed at the end of the period for evidence of value impact. A book is a possibility. Jerome Kagan has also designed a comparative study of child-rearing practices in several cultures around the world.
Educational reform:
Fernando Reimers, of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is designing a pilot project for Mexico that is consistent with the prescriptions of his CMRP essay on educational reform in Latin America. This study will evaluate the impact of an intervention designed to develop knowledge and skills for democratic citizenship among low income adolescents in two states in Mexico. The project will be implemented in 30 lower secondary schools in the area of Ensenada in Baja California and in 30 lower secondary schools in a state in Southern Mexico.
Pilot value/attitude surveys:
Mexican political scientist Miguel Basáñez will direct surveys in several countries using a survey instrument, field tested in Guatemala and Mexico, that derives from the 25-factor typology of progress-prone and progress-resistant cultures developed by the CMRP. The goal is a program of value, belief, and attitude surveys keyed to, and facilitating assessment of, cultural change in as many countries around the world as possible. As is the case with the World Values Survey, the surveys would be repeated periodically, perhaps in five-year cycles. The results will feed into evaluation of the impact of specific cultural change interventions.