Lecture 1: Goals & Methods Flashcards
STATE THE 4 GOALS OF DEVELOPMENTAL SCIENCE
- Describing Development
- Explaining Development
- Developmental Cascades
- Applying Developmental Science
What is Goal 1: Describing Development?
A first goal of developmental psychology is to understand developmental changes across childhood, the nature of these changes (e.g., abrupt vs. slow), and variation in skills in children
What is Quantitative change?
Gradual changes in the amount, frequency, or degree of behaviours…
What is Qualitative change?
A progression through a sequence of distinct changes
What is a way in which child development is quantitative?
Changes in children’s vocabulary appear to be quantitative
What is a way in which child development is qualitative?
The transition from crawling to walking can be viewed as qualitative
List three ways that children differ in their course of development?
– Age of onset
– Rate of change
– The form of skills
What is Developmental Onset
Developmental onset refers to the approximate age when specific skills emerge, such as first words, first steps, first signs of puberty, and so forth.
What is the rate of change
Rate of change refers to the course of change over time, including how fast children progress in their skills.
What is the form of skills
The form of skills refers to what behavior looks like in children with diverging experiences. Striking differences exist for skills that people often assume to be universal, such as counting.
Example:
* Counting: although people assume this skill to be universal, the
Pirahã people appear to lack number concepts
What is Developmental Stability?
Whether children who are relatively low or high on a certain characteristic or behavior at a particular point in time are also relatively low or high at other times
What is Developmental Plasticity?
The impressive capacity of humans to adapt to changing
environments and experiences
What is Goal 2: Explaining Development?
A second goal of developmental psychology is to identify factors that contribute to developmental change in children as a group and to individual differences
What is the nature-nurture debate?
Nature versus nurture is a long-standing debate in biology and society about the relative influence on human beings of their genetic inheritance and the environmental conditions of their development
What is Nature?
A child’s biological endowment, or the genes inherited
from parents, including biological characteristics shared across humans (arms, legs, eyes, etc.) and unique characteristics of people such as physical appearance (eye colour, height, hair colour, etc.) and personality (extraversion, agreeableness, openness, etc.
What is Nurture?
The range of environmental contexts and experiences
that influence development, from birth to death, including family, childcare, school, neighbourhood, and culture.
What is Developmental Cascades?
The idea that change of one
kind can have positive or
negative cascading effects,
setting other kinds of changes
in motion, both immediately
and at later ages.
What are Cascades within time?
Concurrent influences that occur across different domains
and/or between the developing child and the child’s
environment and experiences.
For example, you may have heard parents say “use your words” as their children scream in frustration. Clearly, children can only use their words if they have the language skills to express what they want.
What are Cascades over time?
Changes at one period in development result in changes at a later period in the same or a different domain.
Example: Children who experience low-quality parenting early may
experience academic problems later, as well as limits to future
educational choices
Hypothesis-driven research:
Developmental researchers
begin with a question
involving a specific idea
about what they expect to
find
What is Discovery-based science?
Science based on discovering and understanding what children do and what development looks like without presuppositions
– Piaget’s constructivist theory of development
– Bowlby’s theory of attachment
Sample?
who participates in a study
Generalizability?
how do research findings from one sample extend to a population at large
– The larger the sample, the greater the chance that findings are
generalizable
What is convenience sampling?
Researchers recruit participants into a study based on how easy it is to get them, such as the students in a researcher’s class or children in the local community, which is referred to as convenience sampling.
**Samples of convenience may bias findings and may differ significantly from the larger population
What does WEIRD stand for?
Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic
WEIRD populations in developmental psychology, Why is this a problem?
Increasing evidence that numerous findings in development, even ones presumed to be “universal” are, in fact, tied to specific cultural contexts
- Our understanding of human development is limited
State types of research methods..
- Interviews
- Observations
- Written Surveys
- Physiological Assessments
Study Designs?
A specific plan for conducting a study that allows the researcher to test a study’s
hypotheses
Correlational Studies?
Test associations between two or more variables with no manipulation of variables
Example: Finding a relationship between number of hours
playing violent video games and children’s aggressive
behaviors
Confounding variable?
A third variable that may relate to both dependent and independent variables
Experiments?
A research method testing a hypothesis about a cause-and-effect relationship between two or more variables
Longitudinal study?
Follows the same participants
over time
Cross-sectional study?
Tests different groups of
participants at different ages
Cohort-sequential study?
Tests different groups of
participants, but then follows
them across time
Microgenetic design
Frequent assessments over a small period of time
Inter-rater Reliability?
The extent to which different observers reach the same results
Test-retest Reliability?
A participant receives the same or similar score when tested at
different times and under similar conditions
Face Validity
The purpose of the measure is clear to people who look it over
Concurrent Validity
Reflects the degree to which a measure corresponds to another measure that tests the same phenomenon at the same point in time
Predictive Validity
Reflects the degree to which a measure predicts a criterion to be measured at a future point in time
External Validity
Refers to the extent to which a measure can be applied across different settings or different groups of people
