Chapter 1: An introduction to Child Development Flashcards
What is development?
Systematic continuities and changes between conception to death
What Drives Development?
Maturation: hereditary influences on the aging process
Learning: Change in behaviour due to experience
What are the 3 domains of development?
1: Physical
2: Cognitive
3: Social-Emotional
What are the main (3) Goals of Developmentalists?
1: Describe Development: normative and ideographic
2: Explain Development: why do individuals development differently?
3: Optimize Development: Apply Research to “Real World”
Plato’s beliefs about children and their development
believed that children have innate knowledge
Aristotle Beliefs about children and their development
believed that children are born a blank slate and that all knowledge comes from experience
Beliefs about children in medival times
- Awareness of children as vulnerable
- Questioned whether they were mini adults or if it was just a phase?
Reformation (15th/16th Century)
Children in service to adults, given harsh treatment
Enlightenment
Locke (17th Century): born blank slate, environment important, treatment of children gets better, and need for freedom is thought to be important
Rousseau (18th Century): Innate purity, noble savage that unfolds to blossom
Scientific Foundations: G.S. Hall
normative approach, questionnaire method
adolescence as a unique period
Scientific Foundations: Freud
Linked early experience to later outcome
Scientific Foundations: Watson
Behaviourist theory –> learning focused, lots of information for development came from this
Health and Economics
- Contributes to family survival
- Adult like responsibility early if necessary
- Socioeconomic status –> SES, impacts a lot of factors in development, did the child have enough nourishment, did they have enough attention, did they get spoken to in a way in which they will be enriched and better off down the line?
Important Issues in Development
1: Hereditary and Environment: nature vs. nurture, very intertwined and can’t be separated.
2: Relative Importance of: biological predispositions, environmental influences, environmental influences,
3: epigenetics: whats happening around the gene and how is it being expressed? –> Social determinants
4: Continuity/ Discontinuity:
Continuous: gradual- add more quantity of some skills
discontinuous: stages that are qualitatively different
What role does the child play?
Active: Contributes to own development (theoretically)
Passive: recipients of environmental influence. What can an infant vs. 6 year old vs. 18 year old do in terms of their own development and the environment they are in.
What propels development?
1: Effortful Attention: brain, genes, learning environment
2: Brain development: gene influence on neurotransmitters
3: Sleep: Different areas depending on age (cortex vs. hippocampus)
Contexts affecting development
- Distinct set of circumstances (genetic and environmental)
- Treatment of parents and others
- different reactions
- different choices of environments
Correlational vs. Experimental studies
Correlation used to see if two things are related
Experiment used to determine whether a causal relationship exists
fundamental difference is causation!
What is a Quasi Experiment?
Can control some variables but not all
its a mix of correlation and experimental studies.
Longitudinal Study
- repeated measures of some individuals over a period of time
- time may be brief (1 year) or decades
- studying people of the same age over period of time
pros:
- steady group = better control of extraneous variables
- sleeper effects
Cons:
- lots of time and effort
- costly
- attrition of subjects: loss of data/people
- cohort effect: experience same things (difficult to generalize to a reg/large population)
- Selection
- is question still important after all this time?
- obsolete or invalid measures after time
Cross Sectional Study
- Studying people of different ages at same point in time
- one task, multiple age groups participate
pros:
- simple, doable, cost effective
Cons:
- misses out on things, simple
Sequential Study
- Combination of cross sectional and longitudinal
- Participants of different ages selected at outset (like cross sectional)
- helps to cover the cohort problem
- uses strengths of both ex: optimal age to introduce drug and alcohol education into school
Longitudinal Study Example:
Are there effects of quality daycare on social behaviour?
- if so do those effects have long term consequences?
- assessed aged 4 and 8
- quality of daycare affected cooperativeness and social skills at age 4
Cross Sectional Example
- 10 and 14 years old compared on effectiveness/maturity of time monitoring
- 2 groups on two tasks at home or laboratory
