Chapter 1 Outline
Introduction - Development is age-related change that is orderly, cumulative, and directional.
- Three assumptions:
- There are qualitative and quantitative changes.
- Later abilities, behavior, and understanding emerge from earlier ones in systematic ways.
- Individual development is coherent, reflecting continuity and change.
Basic Principles of Development - There is qualitative change as behavior undergoes reorganization to become increasingly more complex.
- Normative development - typical behavior for the average child.
- Individual development- individuals vary from the norm and there is continuity within each child’s individual developmental pathway over time.
Framework for Understanding Development - Three factors underlie development: genes, developmental history, and current environment. There has been much historical debate about the relative role of these factors alone, and in combination.
- Darwin’s Theory of Evolution
- Provided a framework for examination of gene-environment interaction.
- Organisms adapt to environmental circumstances to increase chances of survival.
- This process occurs via natural selection where advantageous genetic traits are passed on to one’s progeny.
- The theory created interest in child development as researchers questioned how humans evolved and survived.
- Philosophically, the nature-nurture debate entailed two opposing views: Locke’s tabula rasa view where experience is the key to development and Jean Jacques Rousseau’s view that development unfolds naturally, normatively.
- Present views incorporate an interaction between genes and environment. Researchers explore the relative combination of genes and environment to various traits and behaviors (e.g., depression, intelligence, personality).
Theoretical Perspectives on Development - Theory - a set of interrelated statements that serve as frameworks for interpretation of facts and findings, and for guiding scientific research.
- A valid theory:
- Is sensible and consistent.
- Organizes, integrates, and makes sense of a body of research findings.
- Must be testable.
- Some theories focus on normative development while others focus on individual development
- Cognition: Jean Piaget examined normative development of reasoning and thinking skills of infants and children. Skills progress through four qualitatively different stages. Children cannot understand the world and act appropriately upon it until they have the basic structures in place with each stage. His theory has been highly influential in developmental psychology and in education. The stages:
- Sensorimotor (0 - 2 years): Infants are limited to the world of sensation and perception and motor activities until they are capable of mental representational capacities toward the end of this stage.
- Preoperational (2 - 7 years): Operations = logic, and preoperational = pre-logical. Limitations in reasoning (e.g., egocentrism).
- Concrete operations (7 - 12 years): Thinking becomes logical yet children cannot think abstractly.
- Formal Operations (adolescence into adulthood): individual can engage in formal, logical, hypothetical-deductive reasoning.
- Cognition: Information-Processing Theory
- Computer metaphor is used.
- Examines roles of attention, memory storage, memory retrieval, and knowledge base to explain changes in problem solving abilities with development.
- Normative and individual development can be examined.
- Cognition: Sociocultural Theory
- Emphasizes the role played by social interaction and specific cultural practices in cognitive skill development. Qualitative change emphasized.
- Major influence by Lev Vygotsky.
- Children regulate their own behavior via gradually internalizing directives they originally experienced in social interaction with adults.
- First they begin to produce directives via private speech.
- Ultimately they use inner speech to regulate their own behavior.
- Important concept: Zone of proximal development — gap between a particular child’s current performance and that child’s potential performance if given guidance by someone more skilled.
- Social-Emotional: Psychoanalytic View of Sigmund Freud
- Adult personality is formed from early experience where the structures of personality come to fore:
- Id — primitive drives and instincts; innate
- Ego — self; role is to find safe and appropriate expression of id drives
- Superego — the conscience; internalized parental rules and values
- There are five psychosexual stages of development (qualitative and sequential in nature): oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital.
- At each stage, the child must receive appropriate gratification of the sensual pleasure for that stage’s bodily zone. Too little or too much gratification can result in fixation (improper resolution of the major issues of the stage).
- Highly influential theory although his developmental stages are no longer considered valid in application.
- Social-Emotional: Erik Erikson
- Psychoanalytic perspective emphasizing psychosocial development; relationships with others was important for personality development not gratification of bodily zone.
- Are eight qualitatively distinct stages covering the lifespan where each stage has important issues (crises) to resolve. First five pertain to childhood: trust vs. mistrust, autonomy vs. shame and doubt, initiative vs. guilt, industry vs. inferiority, and identity vs. identity confusion.
- Social-Emotional: Social Learning Theory
- Associations made are often from observing models, leading to imitation of behaviors.
- Learning is gradual and individual.
- John Bowlby’s Adaptational Theory
- Combines orientations involving evolution, psychoanalytic psychology, and cognition to explain the nature of early attachment relationships.
- Why so many theories?
- Different theories focus on different aspects of development.
- We cannot have an all-encompassing theory of development with our present state of knowledge.
Major Issues in Development - Is development stage-like or gradual in nature (discontinuous vs. continuous; qualitative vs. quantitative)? Both apply to development.
- Are early experiences or current experiences more important?
Research Methods for Studying Development - Experiment — systematic manipulation of one or more factors in an effort to rule out all other influences on behavior except the ones being studied.
- Most effect method for investigating a hypothesis — testable proposition about behavior.
- Advantage: offer control over testing conditions to reduce variability.
- Disadvantage: limited generalizability to everyday settings.
- Ecological Validity — degree to which findings inside of the laboratory can be applied to the outside world.
- Caution should be used when examining cause and effect outcomes.
- Many areas of interest to developmentalists are not ethically available for investigation.
- Nonexperimental research — no manipulation of factors thought to control behavior
- Natural Experiment — used when subjects cannot be assigned to groups; compare naturally occurring groups of people.
- Advantage: can study issues not appropriate for laboratory settings.
- Advantage: affords greater ecological validity.
- Disadvantage: limited control, no cause-effect outcomes can be determined.
- Naturalistic Observation — observe behavior in everyday settings as it occurs naturally. Long used in ethology.
- Advantage: affords greater ecological validity.
- Disadvantage: limited control, no cause-effect outcomes can be determined.
- Survey Research — use of interviews or questionnaires to collect data; may use randomly selected individuals for inclusion in the study.
- Advantage: provides access to information that could not be gained by any other method.
- Advantage: can collect large amounts of data relatively quickly and cheaply.
- Disadvantage: provides information about people’s perceptions and recollections rather than direct access to events
- Disadvantage: social desirability effect could influence the responses.
- Experimental and nonexperimental research can be combined.
- Longitudinal study — study the same group of individuals over time.
- Advantage: can be used to track individual developmental over time and to examine processes of development. Prospective longitudinal studies — children are followed from early in life, before any developmental problems appear.
- Disadvantage: expensive and time consuming.
- Disadvantage: subject attrition can be problematic for data loss.
- Cross-sectional study — groups of individuals of different ages are studied at the same time.
- Advantage: conducted quickly and cheaply.
- Disadvantage: limited in revelation of processes of development in general and individually.
- Disadvantage: cohort effect can be problematic for interpretation of results.
- Accelerated Longitudinal Design — combination of cross-sectional and longitudinal designs where several age groups can be followed over time simultaneously.
The Themes of This Book - Four themes recur throughout the textbook:
- Development involves both change and logical connections between past and present.
- There is an interplay between individual and normative development.
- Both the timing of normative development and the pathway of individual development are influenced by context.
- Cognitive and social development are closely related.
Three Family Vignettes - The story of four children and three families (Williams, Gordon, Polonius) is presented before each major section and the characters of the vignettes are integrated into concept demonstrations throughout the chapters.
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