What Do Children in India Talk About? Personal Narratives of Typically Developing Hindi-Speaking Children

Abstract

Background: The recent development of the Global TALES Protocol provides a unique opportunity to conduct systematic cross-linguistic and cross-cultural comparisons of children’s personal narratives. This protocol contains 6 scripted prompts to elicit personal narratives in school-age children about times when they experienced feeling happy/excited, worried, annoyed, proud, being in a problem situation, something important. Objectives: The objectives of this study were to examine the topics of the children’s narratives when they responded to the 6 prompts and draw comparisons with the topics of narratives spoken by children from 10 other countries speaking 8 other languages as described in the original feasibility paper. Methods: We translated the Global TALES Protocol into Hindi and collected personal narratives of thirty Hindi-speaking children (aged 6–9 years), residing in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India. All personal narrative samples were elicited in person and audio recorded for manual coding of the topics. Results: Although we observed many similarities in the topics of children’s personal narratives between this dataset and the dataset reported on in the initial feasibility study, we also documented some novel topics, such as “welcoming guests” in response to the “excited” prompt; “financial problems” in response to the “worried” prompt; “helping someone by actions or by advising someone morally” in response to the “problem” prompt; and “mishap/personal loss” and “exams” in response to the “important” prompt. Conclusion: Some of these novel topics likely reflected the Indian culture. Because our study involved a group of children who are linguistically and culturally different from previous studies using the Global TALES protocol and, at ages 6–9 years, slightly younger than the 10-year-olds in prior studies, this study adds to the evidence that the Global TALES protocol can be used to elicit personal narratives of children from diverse languages and cultures, as young as age 6.