Early Means Early: Mapping the Gaps between Expert, Stakeholder, and Public Understandings of Early Childhood Development in South Africa

"Effectively re-framing public understanding of the importance of early childhood development, and its role in individual and community wellbeing, will require the use of new communications tools and strategies that are specifically designed to bridge the gaps..."

As part of an effort to overcome damage done to children and families by the policies and programmes of Apartheid, the South African government has deemed early childhood development (ECD) a "public good" that benefits society, and it has put in place systems to support it. In that context, in 2014, the FrameWorks Institute, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), the University of Witwatersrand, and Stellenbosch University engaged in a research partnership to develop strategic communications that are designed to build demand for a stronger national infrastructure in support of programmes and services that promote ECD. This work produced a strategic report that compares views of ECD between experts in the field, members of the public, and stakeholders in policy and programme implementation in South Africa. It explores the gaps and overlaps in thinking between these groups, explains the implications for strategic communications about ECD in South Africa, and makes recommendations to overcome communications challenges.

FrameWorks explains that the research on public understandings presented here is distinct from other public opinion research based on polls or focus groups that documents what people say. Using a cultural-cognitive approach, the research described here documents how people think, and it deconstructs the assumptions and thought processes that inform what people say and how they form judgments and opinions. The idea is that, "By understanding the various ways that people do (and do not) think and reason about an issue, communicators can craft messages that activate productive understandings, avoid unproductive ones, and engender new ways of thinking that are better aligned with policy goals."

The first phase of research for the project was conducted between November 2015 and April 2016 and involved 3 tracks of research.

1. Identification of a shared scientific expert story - what FrameWorks calls an "untranslated expert story" - of ECD. This story includes explanations of what develops in children, how development happens, and what threatens it, as well as policy and programmatic directions that experts argue would best serve children's development in the South African context. Method: Researchers working with FrameWorks from the University of the Witwatersrand and Stellenbosch University conducted 6 one-on-one, one-hour interviews by phone, Skype, or in person with South African researchers and academics with expertise in ECD.
2. Identification of the patterns of thinking that members of the South African public use to reason about ECD. Method: Data were gathered during 30 in-depth interviews conducted face-to-face with members of the South African public who had been recruited through a range of community-based organisations in all 9 provinces of the country. Data from these extended Cultural Models interviews were supplemented with findings from an additional set of 48 on-the-street interviews conducted in Johannesburg, Durban, and Cape Town.
3. Examination of how stakeholders - people working in government and implementation in the ECD sector - understand these same topics. Method: 10 interviews were conducted by phone, skype, or in person with people working in the ECD arena in both government and implementation sectors.

The report goes on to:

• Present a summary of the untranslated expert story of ECD as derived from FrameWorks' previous collaborations with ECD experts in the United States (US), Australia, the United Kingdom (UK), and Brazil, as well as 6 interviews with South African ECD experts.
• Present the dominant cultural models - shared assumptions and patterns of thinking - that guide and shape the South African public's view of ECD: what it is; what factors shape it; why it matters; and what can and should happen to improve developmental outcomes for more children in the country.
• Present findings suggesting that stakeholder thinking occupies an intermediary place between experts and the public, and that this group holds models that are both consistent with the science, as well as models that are aligned with dominant patterns in public thinking.
• Outline overlaps between expert, stakeholder, and public perspectives that provide a place to start and build from in effectively communicating about ECD. Example area of overlap: Childhood development sets up the rest of life.
• Identify gaps between experts, stakeholders, and the public. Example gap: Role of government: empowering families vs. providing direct services.

Having highlighted some of the central challenges and opportunities involved in engaging members of the South African public in a productive conversation about the importance of ECD, the report describes a set of key communications tasks. In particular, future research should seek to develop and test strategies that help people better understand that:

• The "early" in ECD means early, by countering the strength of what is described in the report as the "Aging Up" model, which distracts people from focusing on the developmental needs of children in the first 1,000 days of life: from conception through the first 2-3 years of life.
• Structural and functional brain development is the crucial locus for developmental processes; fundamental cognitive and self-regulation skills are set up in the earliest months of a child's life; and children require social and emotional interaction, stimulation, and engagement to foster their brain development.
• Public policy must target the pervasive, everyday challenges and ongoing threats that undermine children's development.
• Corporal punishment damages children's development, and there are more effective ways to guide and discipline children.

The report concludes with a preliminary sketch of potential re-framing ideas to test in future research.

• Identify and test values that strengthen the existing understanding that there are positive social outcomes linked to ECD, like having productive and engaged citizens.
• Test explanatory metaphors that have been developed in FrameWorks' previous ECD research that show promise in addressing several of the core gaps and tasks identified above. These include metaphors such as "serve and return" to explain the importance of reciprocity in early stimulation and interaction.
• Develop and test new explanatory metaphors that target gaps specific to the South African context - in particular, to challenge public support for corporal punishment and to help the public better understand the detrimental effects of daily, pervasive environmental stresses on young children's development.

In conclusion: "As researchers, advocates, and practitioners collaborate more strongly around the science of early childhood development, the need to translate this knowledge for members of the public - and thereby elevate support for policies designed to strengthen early childhood development - is increasingly important. However, this translational task is far from simple. Instead, re-framing the public discourse about the early developmental needs and capacities of children requires a comprehensive communications strategy, one that extends the research presented here to develop and test original messaging tools that can generate broader understandings of how children develop, and drive home the point that early really does mean early and that how we interact with young children constitutes the most important environment for development."