Identifying the Developmental Issues in a Research Report

The knowledge that forms the basis of your textbook is largely found in research reports published in professional journals. While Life-Span Development provides you with an encyclopedic coverage of many topics, you will benefit a great deal by trying to "go to the source” for information about as many topics as your time and interest allow. This project suggests a way that you can use Life-Span Development to help you understand formal research reports better. See also Research Project 2 in the next chapter for a similar suggestion.

Find a research report in a journal (e.g., Adolescence, Child Development, Developmental Psychology, Family Therapy, Journal of Marriage and the Family) on a topic that interests you. Read the article, then write a report about it in terms of the life-span perspective and the nature of development as outlined in Chapter 1 of Life-Span Development. Attach a copy of the first page of the research article (include the abstract which briefly summarizes the entire article) to your report. In addition to including the main points of the study and its findings, answer the following questions.

Questions

1. Does the article exemplify the life-span perspective? That is, does it illustrate the seven basic contentions that development is life-long, multidimensional, multidirectional, plastic, historically embedded, multidisciplinary, and contextual? Explain your answer.

2. Does the article explore interactions among normative age-graded influences, normative history-graded influences, and nonnormative events? Explain your answer.

3. Does the article reflect the contemporary concerns of health and well-being, parenting and education, sociocultural context, and social policy? Explain your answer.

4. Which aspects of the nature of development does the article address? For example, is the research about cognitive, social, or biological processes? One or more periods of development? Does the article address such issues as maturation and experience, continuity and discontinuity, stability and change. Again, explain your answers.

Chapter 2

Research Project 1

Parent-Child Interaction

In this project you will observe a parent-child interaction and interpret it according to psychoanalytic, behavioral, and cognitive theoretical approaches. Go to a local supermarket and watch a mother or father shop with a two- to four-year-old child. Describe the interactions you observe, including demands on the part of the child, verbal exchanges between parent and child, and ways in which the parent responds to the demands of the child. Then answer the questions that follow, referring to your observations.

^{Age ____ Sex_____}

Description:

Questions

1. On what would a psychoanalytic theorist focus in this example? How would the sequence of observed events be explained?

2. How would a behavioral psychologist analyze the situation? What reinforces or punishers characterized the interaction? Did specific things occur that would make a behavior more likely to occur in the future? Less likely to occur?

3. On what would a cognitive theorist focus in this situation? Why?

4. What is the child learning in this situation? What does the child already know?