Lecture 4: Methods & Developemtnal Contexts

1. Lecture 4: Methods & Developemtnal Contexts • Major issue • Gradual versus stage • Early versus current experience • Specificity versus generality • Methods • Experiments • Natural experiments • Naturalistic observation • Longitudinal versus cross-sectional versus cross-sequential (accelerated longitudinal design) • Cohort effects • Attrition • Challenges of doing research with children of different ages • Challenges of doing research with children from different cultures • model

2. Lec. 4 outline continued • Contexts of Development • Marasmus, hospitalism, failure to thrive, institutionalization • UrieBronfrenbrenner’s model • Biological environment • Species wide characteristics • Individual characteristics • Immediate environment • Family, including bidirectional effects • Neighborhood • Peer group • Day care/schooling • Social and economic environment • Economic (including maternal employment) • Nontraditional parenting • Single, Gay/lesbian, foster, divorce • SES and poverty, homlessness • Cultural environment • Interactions among the levels in Bronfrenbrenner’s

3. Major Issues • Gradual versus stage models of development. • The relative importance of early versus current experience in guiding development. • Specificity versus generality of developmental acquisitions.

4. Methods in Developmental Psychology • Like personality psychology, developmental psychology is, in part, correlational • One cannot assign personality or age randomly to set of participants. • However, in other aspects, developmental psychology uses the full range of methodologies used in other areas within psychology

5. Experiments • Advantage – clearly establishes causality • Problem– many of the things we would like to investigate it would be unethical to intentionally do to a child to investigate its effect (e.g., child abuse, starvation) • Natural experiments provide a partial solution to this limitation

6. Naturalistic Observation • Advantage – ecological validity • Disadvantages: • Many uncontrolled variables • Usually not a random sample

7. Design of Developmental Studies • Longitudinal – to understand changes with age follow the same children as they grow older • Crossectional – study groups of children of different ages and “presume” the differences between the age groups are a consequence of development. • Cross-sequential (accelerated longitudinal) – combines the two designs above. Is particularly good for revealing cohort effects and helps in understanding non-random attrition.

8. Challenges of working with different age groups • Does the task mean the same thing at different ages. • Ceiling and floor effects.

9. Challenges of doing research with children from different cultures • Does the task mean the same thing to individuals from different cultures. • Do they respond to research situations similarly. • What norms do you use?

10. Contexts of Development Feral Children (the wild boy of Aveyron) • Rene Spits (1945)—orphanages • Romanian orphanages more recently • Concepts • Marasmus, hospitalism, failure to thrive, institutionalization

12. Biological Environment/Individual Child • Species-wide characteristics • Strongest evidence for the importance of heredity • Physical characteristics • Propensity to learn • Propensity to be social and emotional • Individual differences • Traits/temperaments • Interaction between the genetics and environment • canalization

13. Child’s Immediate Environment • Family • Bidirectional effects • Fathers (direct & indirect effects0 • Siblings • Day care (no demonstrable negative effect) • Peer group (symmetrical relations) • Neighborhood – collective socialization • School - John Dewy (good or bad)

14. Social and Economic Context • Social Capital Theory • Maternal employment • Single Parents • Divorce • Non-traditional families • SES – poverty • Homelessness--unemployment

15. Poverty in US • Graph in text looks encouraging with rates going down between 1960 and 2000, although uneven for children with an increase between 1970 and 1990. • Unfortunately, poverty rate for children increased between 2000 to 2010 from 16.2% to 22.0% • Cycle of Poverty

16. Cultures • Cooperation • Education