Investigating Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care
Our Members
Professor Ben Bradley
BA, MA), PhD (Edinburgh)
Ben's PhD "A Study of Young Infants as Social Beings" held two influential findings: 1) that maternal baby-talk could be used to assess the health of the infant-mother relationship in the first few weeks of life – this was immediately taken up by Lynne Murray as a method of assessing the consequences if post-natal depression; 2) that developmental psychologists were in thrall to romantic assumptions about infancy, idealizing the infant's capacities and everyday lives so as to gloss over primitive anxieties and negativities. This led to the publication of his book Visions of Infancy: A Critical Introduction to Child Psychology (Polity Press, 1989) which was translated into Spanish, French & Italian, a summarizing article "Infancy as Paradise" also being translated into Polish. The idea that the psychology of infants was a cultural phenomenon as much as a scientific one has remained influential. In the late 1990s Dr Jane Selby and Prof Bradley developed a new paradigm for the study of infant sociability; the "Babies in Groups" (BiG) paradigm. This was the first time babies had been studied in all-infant groups and has provided evidence of a capacity for supra-dyadic relations by 9 months of age that cannot be theorised under the aegis of attachment theory (which deals only with dyadic relations). At the instigation of Prof Tony Manstead (Cardiff University) our methodological article introducing BiG (Selby & Bradley, 2003) was used as an exemplary text for the British Psychological Society's funded seminar series "Dialoguing across Differences in UK Social Psychology (DaD)" that ran for the year of 2004), the main 'difference' being the qualitative/quantitative divide (which our work straddles). BiG is now being used by researchers in the UK, Israel, USA and Australia.
Ben has been on the editorial boards of Theory & Psychology and The International Journal for Critical Psychology since their inception. In 1994 he won the Rodney G Dennis Fellowship for the Study of Manuscripts in an international competition at the Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. (U$1,500: Harvard University Competitive International Fellowship) for his project on "The Meeting of Mind with Life in William James". In 2007, he was awarded a Visiting Fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Durham University for his work on Darwin & Psychology and he has been invited to organise the section on Infancy at Cambridge University's "Darwin Celebration 2009". His work on infants led to him being appointed Visiting Professor at the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance, Open University, UK (for 2007) and to being invited as a keynote speaker at a variety of therapeutic and scholarly conferences and workshops, including Oslo University College's workshop on "Professional Practice and the Participation of Children" (December, 2007).