Topic 1: History and Research Methods
Chapters 1 and 2
Observe: What happens in development? → What happens throughout time/ when children start
to walk and talk, when milestones happen
Explain: Why does development unfold this way?
Optimize: How can we increase the likelihood of positive outcomes for children?
- Plato and Aristotle
- The welfare of society depends on the well raising of children
- Plato → experience can’t be the source of knowledge/ our senses are too valuable,
we can be tricked easily/ we are born with innate knowledge
- Aristotle → experience is the source of knowledge/
- Origins of Western Developmental Science
- Industrial Revolution in the 1800s
- Factory owners vs reformers → Children were working; reformers were
trying to protect children
- Children's well-being became a concern
- Baby biographies
- Charles Darwin’s records of his son from birth to 5 years
- Recording everything that his son was doing; doing from a scientific
perspective
- Theories of Child Development
- The psychoanalytic perspective
- Freud psychodynamic theory
- Psychosexual stages
- Early experiences impact development
- Anna Freud
- She pushed child psychoanalysis
- noted that children's symptoms need to be considered through the
lens of their developmental stage
- Opened a nursery for war-traumatized children (policy/optimizing
goals)
- The Learning Perspective
- John B. Watson: Classical conditioning - Little Albert
- Aristotle's view - children learn through experience/learning completely
determines how a child will be
- B. F. Skinner: Operant Conditioning
- Reinforcement and Punishment
- Positive and negative
- Bandura: Observational Learning
- Bobo Doll experiment
- The cognitive-Developmental Perspective
- How children think and how thinking changes as they grow
- Jean Piaget and Vygotsky
-
- The Ethological Perspective
- Evolutionary and Biological Perspective
- Konrad Lorenz and Critical Periods
- Baby ducks imprint on the first moving thing they see, imprinting
wouldn't occur if the babies didn’t see a moving object during that
period of time, therefore proving that critical periods exist.
- Reflexive behaviors are adaptive - part of biology
- Critical Periods - window of time in which learning happens
- Learning a language
- Research Methods
- Scientific Method
- Identify a question
- Form a Hypothesis
- Collect data to test hypothesis
- Draw conclusions
- Reliability: Will I consistently get the same measurement every single time
- Validity: Am I measuring what I think I'm measuring
- Collecting Data
- Naturalistic observation
- Structured observation
- Control the variables
- Self-report
- Need to be adapted for different levels of language ability
- Physiological measures
- How the body responds to different stimuli
Research Designs
- Correlational Studies
- Detecting relationship: correlational designs
- r=0 - no relationship
- r>0 positive relationship
- r<0 negative relationship
- / positive \ negative
- Correlation is not causation
- Experimental studies
- Independent variable: things the experiment manipulate
- Dependent variables: the behavior that is measured
- Random Assignment
- But what if random assignment is not possible? Quasi-Experiments
- Age-related Changes
- Three main designs for studying age-related changes
- Longitudinal
- Keeping track of the kids
- Microgenetic design
- A kind of short longitudinal design
- What processes promote developmental changes?
- Intense observational when developmental change
is expected to occur
- Motor developmental - a child learning how to
walk, what are the small things that happen in
between crawling and walking
- Not related to genetics
- Pros
- continuity/ discontinuity
- Can reveal links btw early experience and later outcomes
- Cons
- The cross-generational problem
- Cost, time
- Attrition - dropping out of the study
- Selective attrition - dropping out for specific reasons
- Galambos et al., 2006
- What if the people who dropped out are the ones
with low self-esteem
- It could harm the study
- Cross-sectional
- Pros
- Quick, cheap
- Demonstrates age difference
- Cons
- Cohort effect
- What appears to be a difference between age could
be a difference between the years they were born
- Can say nothing about how development occurs
- Sequential
- Combine cross-sectional and longitudinal
- Can compare 9-year-olds in 2012 and 9-year-olds in 2009
- Pros
- Same as longitudinal design but with less cost and time
- Can compare different cohorts at the same age
- If different → cohort and/or practice effect
- If similar → age effect (development)
- Can compare different cohorts patterns of development
across time
- Age-related patterns specific to a specific cohort
- Cons
- A bit complicated
- time-consuming compared to cross-sectional
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- Each design can use any data collection method
