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After her first year of teaching, Horowitz wanted to continue her education and get a master's degree through the School of Education at the University of Iowa. She didn't know, however, that the Superintendent of the Iowa City Schools was a good friend of the Dean of the School of Education. The Superintendent told the Dean not to admit Horowitz because she was a troublemaker (Horowitz, 2001).
Boyd McCandless, a developmentalist interested in the process of early socialization, suggested to Horowitz that she should study at the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station. At the time this was one of the best places to study child and developmental psychology. Horowitz had never taken a class in psychology and was frightened at the thought of taking statistics. She wanted to continue her studies, however, and so she took the offer of full fellowship plus tuition. Three years later Horowitz finished her degree with an observational/experimental dissertation on the reinforcement value of peers as social stimuli for preschool children (Horowitz, 2001).
After she finished her degree Horowitz moved to Oregon with her husband and two sons, where her husband worked at Southern Oregon College. There was a rule stating that two members of the same family could not work there. She did, however, teach a little and wrote her dissertation for publication. She also got a grant from Sigma Xi to do some research (Horowitz, 2001).
Horowitz grew up in New York City in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood surrounded by family and tradition. She felt out of place in the Midwest during her study, which led her to become friends with other New Yorkers Gerald and Eileen Siegel because it made her feel closer to home and gave her a connection This friendship eventually led to a position at the University of Kansas in the English department for her husband. The University of Kansas also had a rule stating that two members of the same family could not work there at the same time. While there, however, Horowitz gained a position at the Bureau of Child Research in Kansas. Once the University of Kansas got rid of the nepotism rule; Horowitz took on the creation of the Department of Human Development and Family Life. The creation of this department involved a partnership with the Bureau of Child Development (Horowitz, 2001).
During her time at Kansas Horowitz was interested in individual differences in relation to how similar experiences and environments have differential impact on the development of different children. She felt it was important to study these differences as early as possible. This led to an infant research laboratory where she conducted several studies on infant visual attention and discrimination (Horowitz, 2001).
She conducted a study in which infants were exposed to a stimulus for twenty seconds and noticed that some babies looked at the stimulus longer than others did. After discovering this fact, Horowitz decided to let the infants control the experiment and only exposed the infants to the stimulus for as long as they looked at it. Some infants were finished with the stimulus after five seconds; others looked at it for thirty seconds or even a minute (Horowitz, 2001).
This increased Horowitz's interest in pursuing individual difference research. Through her connection with the Childhood research program at Kansas she was able to come into association with the well-known pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton who was forming a newborn observational strategy. Using his initial work she was able to work several others to form the Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale or the Brazelton scale (Horowitz, 2001).
Horowitz had several concerns with forming this scale, including possible misuse in evaluating infants. She and her colleagues therefore made it impossible to get a single number from the scale. The definitions of optimal newborn behavior were organized so that for some items optimal was at the low end of a nine-point scale, and for others it was at the middle or high end of the scale. This way a single number could not be assigned to an infant only a few days of age (Horowitz, 2001).
Everybody working on the scale, however, did not agree that it should not be used to make predictions about development. Brazelton himself envisioned the scale as being predictive of development later in life. Horowitz did not go along with this view because her "view of development is all about multiple variables functioning in a dynamic equation over time." She feels that there are many complex factors affecting development, and measures taken at birth cannot be used to determine or predict what goes on later in life (Horowitz, 2001).
Horowitz believes there is a consensus that involves the notion that the general outlines of behavioral development have strong biological bases and will develop in most normal environments. But the specific behaviors that must be acquired are very much influenced by the availability of opportunities for learning in the child's environment. This duality involving the biologically determined general outlines of the behavioral agenda and the environmentally controlled opportunities to learn can be thought of as reflecting both universals and nonuniversals of behavioral development (Horowitz, 1989).
Horowitz found universals are especially apparent in language and cognition. For example, all normal children acquire language. Thus, the general capability to speak and communicate is a universal, and some of the specific features of language also appear to have universal characteristics. Beyond these universals, however, much of what is acquired and most likely the quality of the acquisition appears to rest on particular aspects of the child's experience. That is, different environments provide different kinds of learning opportunities (Horowitz, 1989).
Individual children also bring different abilities to the learning situation. Although all normal children will acquire the universal aspects of language, some children, as a function of individual differences and specific environmental learning opportunities, will acquire extensive vocabularies and exhibit the most complex grammatical structures of the language they speak. Others will have more modest vocabularies and may use and understand only simple grammatical structures (Horowitz, 1989).
Religion was also an important part of Horowitz's life, and she had the opportunity to spend a year in Israel to do research in pediatrics. In an essay on Yom Kippur she said "Yom Kippur in Israel held the promise of once again living wholly in only one quiet, contemplative world for an unbroken period of time." Unfortunately, there was a war going on at the time so she and her family did not get the quiet holiday they had hoped for. This was also true in America, where it is nearly impossible to be totally isolated from the world for a day (Horowitz, 1995).
Horowitz said in the essay that she had always struggled with the holiday, trying to find balance between rationality and the spiritual. It is a day full of emotion for the Jewish people, and there is nothing such as the dreidel, menorah, or stories to simplify it for children. She came to the conclusion that Yom Kippur is a day in her Jewish life that can be thought of as being about a set of parallel equations. One equation is person to person and the obligations for rectifying wrong; the other equation is person and community to the larger society. The second equation comes with the obligation to contribute to the function of rectifying those wrongs that disturb and perturb an ethical system (Horowitz, 1995).
Frances Degen Horowitz made several contributions to the field of developmental psychology. She has written several articles, edited, fostered organizations, and held leadership positions such as president of the developmental division of the APA. She feels, however, that her most significant contribution is her effort to come up with a model of development that recognizes how complex it is (Horowitz, 2001).
Works Cited