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An Introduction to Child Development
How Children Develop (3rd ed.) Siegler, DeLoache & Eisenberg
Chapter 1
Overview
I. Why Study Child Development?
II. Historical Foundations of the study of Child Development
III. Enduring Themes in Child Development
IV. Methods for Studying Child Development
I. Why Study Child Development?
A. Raising Children
B. Choosing Social Policies
C. Understanding Human Nature
A. Raising Children
Knowledge of child development can help parents and teachers meet the challenges of rearing and educating children.
Researchers have identified effective approaches that parents and other caregivers can successfully use in helping children manage anger and other negative emotions.
B. Choosing Social Policies
Knowledge of child development permits informed decisions about social-policy questions that affect children. Psychological research on children’s responses to
leading interview questions can help courts obtain more accurate testimonies from preschool children.
C. Understanding Human Nature
Child-development research provides important insights into some of the most intriguing questions regarding human nature.
Recent investigations of development among children adopted from inadequate orphanages in Romania supports the principle that the timing of experiences often influences their effects.
II. Historical Foundations of the Study of Child Development
A. Early Philosophers’ Views of Children’s Development
B. Social Reform Movements
C. Darwin’s Theory of Evolution
D. The Emergence of Child Development as a Discipline
A. Early Philosophers’ Views of Children’s Development
Provided enduring insights about critical issues in childrearing, even though their methods were unscientific
Both Plato and Aristotle believed that the long-term welfare of society depended on children being raised properly, but they differed in their approaches.
Plato Versus Aristotle
Plato: emphasized self-control
and discipline
believed that children are born with innate knowledge
Aristotle: was concerned with
fitting child rearing to the needs of the individual child
believed that knowledge comes from experience
Later Philosophers
John Locke, like Aristotle, saw the child as a tabula rasa and advocated first instilling discipline, then gradually increasing the child’s freedom.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that parents and society should give the child maximum freedom from the beginning.
B. Social Reform Movements
In the nineteenth century, research was conducted for the benefit of children and provided some of the earliest descriptions of the adverse effects that harsh environments can have on child development
C. Darwin’s Theory of Evolution
Later in the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin’s work on evolution inspired research in child development in order to gain insights into the nature of the human species
A Biographical Sketch of an Infant (Darwin, 1877)
D. The Emergence of Child Development as a Discipline
Child development emerged as a formal field of inquiry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Sigmund Freud and John Watson formulated influential theories of development during this period.
Freud and Watson
Freud concluded that biological drives exerted a crucial influence on development.
Watson argued that children’s behavior arises largely from the rewards and punishments that follow particular behaviors.
Although the research methods on which these theories were based were limited, the theories were better grounded in research and inspired more sophisticated thinking than their predecessors.
III. Enduring Themes in Child Development
1. Nature and Nurture
2. The Active Child
3. Continuity/Discontinuity
4. Mechanisms of Developmental Change
5. The Sociocultural Context
6. Individual Differences
7. Research and Children’s Welfare
Basic Questions About Child Development
Questions ThemesHow do nature and nurture together shape development?
Nature and nurture
How do children shape their own development?
The active child
In what ways is development continuous, and in what ways is it discontinuous?
Continuity/ Discontinuity
How does change occur? Mechanisms of developmental change
How does the sociocultural context influence development?
The sociocultural context
How do children become so different from each other?
Individual differences
How can research promote children’s well-being?
Research and children’s welfare
1. Nature and Nurture The single most basic question
about child development is how nature and nurture interact to shape the developmental process.
Nature refers to our biological endowment, especially the genes we receive from our parents.
Nurture refers to the wide range of environments, both physical and social, that influence our development.
1. Nature and Nurture
Developmentalists now recognize that every characteristic we possess is created through the joint workings of nature and nurture.
They ask how nature and nurture work together to shape development.
2. The Active Child Children contribute to their own
development from early in life, and their contributions increase as they grow older.
Three of the most important contributions during children’s first years are their: Attentional patterns Use of language Play
Older children and adolescents choose many environments, friends, and activities for themselves; their choices can exert a large impact on their future.
3. Continuity/Discontinuity
Continuous development: Age-related changes occur gradually
3. Continuity/Discontinuity
Discontinuous development: Age-related changes include occasional large shifts so that children of different ages seem qualitatively different
3. Continuity/Discontinuity
Stage theories propose that development occurs in a progression of age-related, qualitative shifts
3. Continuity/Discontinuity
Depending on how it is viewed, changes in height can be viewed as either continuous or discontinuous. Examining a boy’s height at
yearly intervals from birth to 18 years makes the growth look gradual and continuous
Examining changes in the same boy’s height from one year to the next makes growth seem discontinuous
4. Mechanisms of Developmental Change
In general, the interaction of genes and environment determines both what changes occur and when those changes occur.
For example, one mechanism involves the role of brain activity, genes and learning experiences in the development of effortful attention.
4. Mechanisms of Developmental Change What role do genes and learning
experiences play in influencing this mechanism of effortful attention?
Genes influence the production of neurotransmitters, and variations in these genes are associated with performance on tasks of effortful attention.
Children’s experiences also can change the wiring of the brain system that produces effortful attention.
5. The Sociocultural Context
Sociocultural context: Refers to the physical, social, cultural, economic, and historical circumstances that make up any child’s environment
Contexts of development differ within and between cultures
In many countries, mothers and children sleep together for the first several years of the child’s life, but in the U.S. infants usually sleep separately from their parents soon after birth.
The U.S. culture values independence and self-reliance, whereas the Mayan culture values interdependence
5. The Sociocultural Context
Development is affected by ethnicity, race and socioeconomic status
The socioeconomic context exerts a particularly large influence on children’s lives
5. The Sociocultural Context
6. Individual Differences Individual differences
among children arise very quickly in development.
Children’s genes, their treatment by other people, their subjective reactions to other people’s treatment of them, and their choice of environments all contribute to differences among children, even those within the same family.
7. Research andChildren’s Welfare
Child-development research yields practical benefits in diagnosing children’s problems and in helping children to overcome them.
A research method known as preferential looking has enabled the diagnosis of the effects of cataracts in infants as young as 2 months of age.
IV. Methods for Studying Child Development
A. The Scientific Method
B. Contexts for Gathering Data about Children
C. Correlation and Causation
D. Designs for Examining Development
E. Ethical Issues in Child-Development Research
A. The Scientific Method
An approach to testing beliefs that involves:
1. Choosing a question
2. Formulating a hypothesis (i.e., an educated guess)
3. Testing the hypothesis
4. Drawing a conclusion
Importance of Appropriate Measurement
Relevance toHypotheses
Relevance toHypotheses
ReliabilityReliability
ValidityValidity
Questions of InterestQuestion Property
Do the hypotheses predict in a straightforward way what should happen on these measures?
Relevance to hypotheses
Do different raters who observe the same behavior classify or score it the same way?
Interrater reliability
Are the scores or classifications that children receive on the measure stable over time?
Test–retest reliability
Can effects within the experiment be attributed to the variables that the researcher intentionally manipulated?
Internal validity
How widely can the findings be generalized to different children, measures, and experimental procedures than the ones in the study?
External validity
Reliability
The degree to which independent measurements of a given behavior are consistent Interrater reliability: The amount of
agreement in the observations of different raters who witness the same behavior
Test-retest reliability: Attained when measures of performance are similar on two or more occasions
Validity Refers to the degree to which a test or
experiment measures what it is intended to measure
Researchers strive for two types of validity:
Internal validity is the degree to which effects observed within experiments can be attributed to the variables that the researcher intentionally manipulated.
External validity is the degree to which results can be generalized beyond the particulars of the research.
B. Contexts for Gathering Data about Children
1. Interviews1. Interviews
2. Naturalistic Observation
2. Naturalistic Observation
3. StructuredObservation
3. StructuredObservation
1. Interviews
Structured interview: A research procedure in which all participants are asked to answer the same questions
Clinical interview: A procedure in which questions are adjusted in accord with the answers the interviewee provides
Caveat: Although interviews yield a great deal of data quite quickly and can provide in-depth information about individual children, the answers to interview questions are often biased.
2. Naturalistic Observation
Limitations Because naturally occurring
contexts vary on many dimensions, it is often hard to know which ones influenced the behavior of interest.
Also, many behaviors occur only occasionally in everyday environments, and so researchers’ opportunities to study them through naturalistic observation are reduced.
Used when the primary goal of research is to describe how children behave in their usual environments
3. Structured Observation
Involves presenting an identical situation to a number of children and recording each child’s behavior, enabling direct comparisons of different children’s behavior and making it possible to establish the generality of behavior across different tasks
Limitation Does not provide as
much information about children’s subjective experiences and does not provide as natural a situation.
Contexts for Gathering Data
p. 29
C. Correlational & Causation
The primary goal of studies that use correlational designs is to determine how variables are related to one another.
A correlation is the association between two variables. The direction and strength of a
correlation is measured by a statistic called the correlation coefficient.
Correlations
Correlation Causation!
Direction-of-causation problem It is not possible to tell from a
correlation which variable is the cause and which is the effect.
Third-variable problem A correlation between two variables
may arise from both being influenced by some third variable.
Experimental Designs
Allow inferences about causes and effects
Rely on random assignment, a procedure in which each child has an equal chance of being assigned to any group within an experiment
Experimental Designs
Experimental control refers to the ability of the researcher to determine the specific experiences that children have during the course of an experiment. Children in the experimental group receive an
experience of interest, the independent variable. Those in the control group do not receive this
experience. The dependent variable is a behavior that is
hypothesized to be affected by the independent variable.
Correlational vs. Experimental Designs
Design Key Features Advantages Disadvantages
Correlational Comparison of existing groups of children or examination of relations among each child’s scores on different variables
Only way to compare many groups of interest (boys-girls, rich-poor, etc.)
Only way to establish relations among many variables of interest (IQ and achievement; popularity and happiness, etc.)
Third-variable problem
Direction-of-causation problem
Experimental Random assignment of children to groups and experimental control of procedures presented to each group
Allows causal inferences because design rules out direction-of-causation and third-variable problems
Naturalistic experiments can demonstrate cause-effect connections in natural settings
Need for experimental control often leads to artificial experimental situations
Cannot be used to study many differences and variables of interest, such as age, sex, and temperament
D. Designs for Examining Development
1. Cross-Sectional1. Cross-Sectional
2. Longitudinal2. Longitudinal
3. Microgenetic3. Microgenetic
1. Cross-Sectional Designs
Children of different ages are compared on a given behavior or characteristic over a short period of time
2. Longitudinal Designs
Used when the same children are studied twice or more over a substantial period of time
3. Microgenetic Designs
Used to provide an in-depth depiction of processes that produce change
In this approach, children who are thought to be on the verge of an important developmental change are provided with heightened exposure to the type of experience that is believed to produce the change and are studied intensely while their behavior is in transition.
Comparison of Designs
Design Key Features Advantages Disadvantages
Cross-sectional
Children of different ages are studied at a single time
Yields useful data about differences among age groups
Quick and easy to administer
Uninformative about stability of individual differences over time
Uninformative about similarities and differences in individual children’s patterns of change
Longitudinal Children are examined repeatedly over a prolonged period of time
Indicates the degree of stability of individual differences over long periods
Reveals individual children’s patterns of change over long periods
Difficult to keep all participants in study
Repeatedly testing children can threaten external validity of study
Microgenetic Children are observed intensively over a relatively short time period while a change is occurring
Intensive observation of changes while they are occurring can reveal process of change
Reveals individual change patterns over short periods in considerable detail
Does not provide information about typical patterns of change over long periods
Does not reveal individual change patterns over long periods
p. 36
E. Ethical Issues in Child-Development Research
Researchers have a vital responsibility to anticipate potential risks that the children in their studies may encounter, to minimize such risks, and to make sure that the benefits of the research outweigh the potential harm.
