Overview/ research Flashcards
What are the themes in developmental psychology?
1.Nature and nurture
2.Individual differences
3.The active child- development isn’t just something that happens to the child- researchers try to pull apart reasons
4.(Dis)continuity of development and critical periods (Piaget and Vygotsky)
5.Socio-cultural context- what is around the child and how that affects development (bronth and breener)
What are the 3 ways to measure development?
1) Cross-sectional design
2) Longitudinal design
3) Microgenetic design
What is a cross-sectional design and list pros/ cons
Compare children of different ages at a single time.
By doing this you could see whether they have developed a Theory of Mind. What you typically see is that at around age 4 most of them are now beginning to understand that they have developed it.
PROS:
- Faster to collect data (and cheaper!)
- Can identify differences between age groups
CONS:
- Uninformative about continuity/ discontinuity of development over age (e.g. stability of wellbeing)- we just know that across 2 age groups say there are differences. (doesn’t tell us about how or why)
- Uninformative about individual differences (within a cohort)- it averages children out at different ages and helps reveal similarities and differences between older and younger children, but doesn’t tell you how wellbeing changes for an individual child over time or at different rates.
Explains the what but not how
What is a longitudinal design and list pros/ cons
- Compare children to themselves.
- Children are examined repeatedly over a prolonged period (over months or years).
- Following the same children over a substantial period of time and measuring changes and continuities in these children’s development at regular intervals (big cohort studies do this).
PROS:
- Watch development unfold!
- Can examine the stability of individual differences over time and individual patterns of change
CONS:
- Practice effects
- Attrition (drop out) rates and bias (population bias)
- Takes a long time and a lot of resources- is it worth doing?
Longitudinal design:
1) what can you assess (design and theme)
2) when are they primarily used?
1) You can assess within-person changes with age and between-person differences in age changes; can also allow you to explore the theme of the ‘active child’ – bidirectional effects (e.g. temperament and parenting)
2) Due to cost and time they are used primarily when the research questions are related to stability and change in individual children over time. When the main focus is age-related changes in typical performance, cross-sectional studies are usually chosen.
What is a microgenetic design and list pros/ cons
- Children are observed intensively over a relatively short period.
- A change occurs within this short period.
- It’s like a focused and intense longitudinal design
PROS:
- Very detailed
- Intensive observation can clarify process of change as it occurs
CONS:
- Must know when change will occur
- No long term data about change patterns
- Narrow in focus
Usually applied to learn more about changes of cognitive functioning (e.g. theory of mind or arithmetic). Gives some precise information on the process of change but narrow in focus.
Basically there are no best methods. They all have issues. Has the researcher picked the best method to investigate whatever they are trying to investigate?
Genetically Informative Designs:
- what do they allow us to estimate?
- list some examples
Allow us to estimate (and in some cases locate) genetic contributions to development (eg. heritability)
- Twin studies e.g. identical vs non-identical twin comparisons
- Adoption
- Adopted twins
- DNA sequencing
- Molecular-genetic
- Genomewide scan
What are genetically informative designs useful for?
Useful for answering questions about Nature and Nurture.
List 3 common data contexts
- Interview/ questionnaire
- Naturalistic observation
- Structured observation/ tasks
Outline pros and cons of interviews/ questionnaires
Pros:
- Inexpensive way to gather self-reports.
- Clinical interviews allow for flexibility to respond to unexpected answers.
Cons:
- Often extract biased or ingenuine responses.
- They are also poor at predicting future behaviour.
- Relies on the child understanding the question etc.; often reliant on parent completion; shared method variance
Outline pros and cons of naturalistic observations
Pros:
Useful for describing behaviour and exploring social interaction.
Cons:
Lack control; naturally occurring contexts vary on many dimension. It can be hard to know which element of the situation is influential. Limited ability to explore infrequent behaviours.
Outline pros and cons of structured observation/ tasks
Pros:
- Allows controlled comparisons.
- Overcome some of the limitations of natural observations. Researchers design a situation to elicit a certain behaviour and repeat this for all participants. Allows direct comparison and for less common behaviours to be elicited
Cons:
- lack external validity.
What are some participatory techniques?
- timelines and social network maps
- NSPCC research with children in care
What are some practical problems (Fargas-Malet et al, 2010)?
- Gaining access and seeking consent
- Context/location
- Data collection
- Confidentiality and child protection issues
- Debriefing and rewards
(harder to apply when critiquing studies in essays- How can we be sure that we are gathering representative information on all cohorts for example. Problematic children often not included in studies (e.g. victims of bullying not at school)).
Reliability:
- what is it?
- types?
The degree to which independent measurements of a behaviour are consistent
Inter-rater reliability: the amount of agreement in the observations of different raters who witnesses the same behaviour
Test-retest reliability: the degree of similarity of a pp’s performance on two or more occasions
