Irene Caye M.

Cinco

PHI41

Review of Ventura’s “An overview of Child Psychology in the

Philippines”

This paper is a review of a comprehensive research in Child Psychology entitled

“An overview of Child Psychology in the Philippines” written by Elizabeth Ventura. The
research paper was published in 1981 by the Philippine Journal of Psychology. The
objective of the paper is (1) to review and examine all the accumulated 144 studies
done in the area of Child Psychology in the Philippines from the late sixties to 1980 and
(2) to provide an overview of the current status of Child Psychology in the Philippines
during that time by using the data gathered from the examined studies and (3) to
ultimately come up with recommendations that will define the possible focus of future
searches in Child Psychology here in the Philippines.

The author started by providing a comprehensive review of the contemporary

events and trends in child psychology in the 1980s and identifying the progress of
specific areas that contributed to the growth of the field. These trends included the
government’s establishment of nationwide programs for children such as the Mental
Feeding Program and the Children’s Communication Center. According to Ventura,
direct involvement of child psychologists will be necessary in the implementation and
formulation of public policies that will address the needs of the Filipino children. Another
area that will need the attention of child psychologists is the rapidly growing number of
pre-schools all over the country. According to Ventura, there seemed to be a need to re-
examine the government’s policy regarding the establishment and regulation of these
schools.

The method used in this research is quantitative. The author utilized this method
to examine the trends across all the 144 studies and summarized them into these
categories: age and sex of the subjects, locale of the study, methods used, and the
areas of development covered. Moreover, an area by area analysis was also made in
the original monograph according to the author. During data gathering, the participants
chosen by the researchers were mostly composed of school-age children between the
ages 7 and 12 living in urban settings. On the other hand, adolescents and children
below 3 seemed to be neglected in the studies. As for the locale of the study, the
researchers seemed to focus more on urban settings as opposed to the rural
counterpart.
 The statistics of the gathered data obtained from all 144 studies implied that
there’s no lack of interest in the study of child psychology in the Philippines. However,
the focus of the studies was too concentrated on the urban school-aged child and the
testing strategy of choice seemed to be lacking as most researchers only met with the
participants briefly in a single session, and they merely focused on exploring an aspect
of the participants’ socio-emotional development. This suggests that the said studies
seemed to lack a well-thought-out program of research because most of the
researchers determined the choice of setting, subjects, and strategy depending on how
convenient it will be for them.

According to Ventura, the typical researcher also appeared to be a student doing

a paper, thesis, or dissertation. Therefore, it can be assumed that the primary purpose
of doing the study was mostly to fulfill a course requirement as opposed to doing the
study mainly for the sake of enriching the field of Child Psychology in the Philippines by
contributing studies that can be continued, since the former often result to an
abandonment of the research problem after the degree was hurdled. The research then
remains preliminary or exploratory without any further exploration or analysis of the
research problems.

With these implications, Ventura formulated some recommendations. First, to

address the concentration of most studies on school-aged children living in urban areas,
she suggested that future researches focusing more on infancy and adolescence must
be done. Making more of these studies within the rural context or with rural-urban
comparison groups was also recommended as this will address the lack of studies in
this particular setting. She also implored future researchers to avoid short one-shot
studies wherein they only have brief encounters with the subjects as this will obscure
the possibility of studying the behavior of the child in other relevant contexts such as the
developmental one.

In conclusion, Ventura’s research had made us realize that child psychologists in

the country needed to be more committed to the study of Filipino children. This
commitment will guide scholars and other child psychologists in creating a more critical
and well-thought-out research program in Child Psychology that will address the unique
condition of the children here in the Philippines.