Chapter 14: Overarching themes

Question 1

How do we know the child is socially competent from an early age?

Answer 1

• Infants are competent and active beings who possess a wide range of social and emotional capabilities
• Newborns can use their sensory, perceptual, and motor capacities to respond to social signals and communicate their needs
• By age 1 infants can use social referencing to guide their behavior in uncertain situations and can produce social signals to alert others to interesting events
• By age 2 infants can infer that other people have thoughts, feelings, and intentions

Question 2

How do we know the child’s social behaviour is organized?

Answer 2

• Crying, smiling, and looking are organized response patterns that enable even very young infants to interact with others
• Infants develop working models of their social world that guide interactions with others
• Across development children use social information in increasingly organized and strategic ways

Question 3

How do we know the child’s social behaviour becomes increasingly sophisticated?

Answer 3

As children develop they demonstrate social competence in more mature forms and under more challenging conditions

Question 4

How is the child embedded in levels of social complexity?

Answer 4

• Dyadic, triadic and group interactions
• Social relationships
• Social groups
• Social networks
• Society or culture

Question 5

How are children’s interactions with other people reciprocal and transactional?

Answer 5

• Children influence the behavior of other people around them and are influenced by the reactions of other people in return
• —Difficult vs. easy infants elicit different responses from social partners
• Pattern of mutual modification over time is best described as transactional

Question 6

How are aspects of development interdependent?

Answer 6

• Shifts in other domains, including: motor skills, language abilitiesand cognitive functions play a role in social development
• Social development is a “holistic” that is fuelled by advances in other areas

Question 7

What are the multiple interacting causes of social behaviour?

Answer 7

-Biological factors: Genetics, brain organization, and hormonal levels
-Environmental factors:
parents’ behavior, peer relations, school experiences, cultural background, mass media
-Systems theory approaches, which emphasize the interplay among biological and environmental influences, help to organize the multiple causes of social development coherently
-all causes are important (our job is to figure out how different causal factors work together to facilitate or hinder children’s social development)

Question 8

what social agents influence social behaviour in multiple social systems?

Answer 8

• Family system (e.g., parents, siblings)
• Larger social systems
  (e. g., schools, communities, media, and society)

Question 9

How does social behaviour across both situations and individuals?

Answer 9

• Although children behave differently in different situations, this does not mean that child behavior is determined only by the situation
• Children’s individual characteristics also matter
• Our goal is to determine how individual differences among children modify the degree and form of their reactions to different situations

Question 10

Does social development occur differently depending on cultural context?

Answer 10

• In different regions of the world and communities within a country - children have different experiences
• Children may require different social skills depending on their cultural group
• Observing the socialization of children across a variety of cultures and subcultures can be a source of insights about social development

Question 11

Does social development occur differently depending on historical context?

Answer 11

• Experiences differ across history. Economic conditions, for example.
• Need to update our understanding of social development as the social world of children of different cohorts appear over time

Question 12

What aspects of social development are universal?

Answer 12

• Social development is affected by universally shared achievements: Learning to walk and talk, Emotional expression and biological preparedness for social interaction
• Determining which aspects of social behavior are universal and which are culturally determined is a continuing challenge

Question 13

Is development gradual and continuous or rapid and dramatic?

Answer 13

-Both gradual and rapid changes contribute to social development
-Rapid biological changes include
Growth spurts, changes in the brain (e.g., prefrontal cortex), onset of puberty
-Environmental changes that contribute include
School transitions, increased responsibilities (e.g., voting, driving)
-Other experiences (divorce, natural disasters) also contribute

Question 14

What two pathways of social development are important to trace?

Answer 14

• Tracing Both ‘Normative’ Pathways and Individual Pathways Is Important
• Age-related norms of social development are useful guides for knowing what to expect of children at certain ages
• Recognizing and tracking the variety of individual developmental trajectories is important as well

Question 15

Development is a lifelong process- what are the goals in studying lifespan development?

Answer 15

-To identify the types of childhood experiences that account for:
successful or, not-so-successful adult development
-To understand how adult development of parents and others with whom the child interacts affects children’s development

Question 16

What takes priority over methods in research?

Answer 16

• Questions take priority over methods: Without a sound and sensible question, even great methodological creativity will not advance our understanding of social development
• Pursuing a meaningful question with a less optimal method is better than investigating an unimportant question with a more sound method

Question 17

What is important to remember about methods?

Answer 17

• No Single Method Will Suffice
• To provide a complete and definitive answer to any research question, using a variety of methods to collect data is important
• Using multiple methods to look at facets of social development from different angles will provide broader and deeper understanding

Question 18

What is important to remember about samples?

Answer 18

• No Single Sample Will Suffice
• Using a variety of samples will capture the cultural, ethnic, and socioeconomic richness of children’s development, both within the individual countries and throughout the world

Question 19

What is important to remember about theories and why?

Answer 19

• No Single Theory Will Suffice
• At present, no single theory provides a full and complete explanation of all domains of children’s social development
• Challenge for the future: to integrate theories into a coherent overarching theory of the “whole child”

Question 20

What is important to remember about disciplines?

Answer 20

• No Single Discipline Will Suffice
• A number of scientific disciplines besides psychology contribute in important ways to our understanding of children’s social development

Question 21

How does research on social development inform policy?

Answer 21

Sharing knowledge of research findings helps policy makers design scientifically based intervention and prevention programs aimed at improving the social lives of children

Question 22

How does social policy inform research on social development?

Answer 22

Social policy decisions are natural experiments and provide rich opportunities for researchers to track the consequences of policy changes on the lives of children and families

Question 23

What type of social policies are inadequate?

Answer 23

-One-Size-Fits-All Social -Policies Are Inadequate

Because families and communities are diverse, there is a need to provide diverse social policies and services