Key Terms

1.0 Images of Life-Span Development: Jack Kevorkian, The "Suicide Doctor"

physician-assisted suicide

biomedical ethics

2.0 Defining Death

brain death

euthanasia active

euthanasia passive

euthanasia

3.0 Death and Sociohistorical, Cultural Contexts

death avoider

death denier

4. A Developmental Perspective on Death

sudden infant death syndrome (SIDs)

5.0 Facing One's Own Death

denial and isolation anger

bargaining

depression

acceptance

perceived control and denial

hospice

6.0 Coping with the Death of Someone Else

grief suttee (публичное самосожжение вдовы с телом мужа (запрещено англичанами в 19 в. В Индии); вдова;)

thanatologists

7. Death Education

death education

8. Contemporary Concerns Amish

Traditional Judaism

Bereavement (тяжелая утрата)

Essay and Critical Thinking Questions

Comprehension and Application Essay Questions

We recommend that you follow either our guidelines for "Answering Essay and Critical Thinking Questions," or those provided by your instructor, when preparing your response to these questions. Your answers to these kinds of questions demonstrate an ability to comprehend and apply ideas discussed in this chapter.

1. Indicate and explain the alternative definitions of death.

2. Distinguish between active and passive euthanasia, and indicate which type of euthanasia best characterizes the activities of Dr. Jack Kevorkian.

3. Provide at least two examples of practices that indicate death acceptance and death avoidance.

4. Explain how death might be defined and perceived by individuals at different stages of life-span development such as preschoolers, elementary school children, adolescents, and young, middle-aged, and older adults.

5. Describe the stages in Kilbler-Ross's analysis of dying.

6. Compare and contrast the alternative conceptions of grief.

7. Indicate and briefly explain different ways that people mourn the death of others.

8. What is a thanatologist? Also indicate why this vocation is attractive or unattractive to you.

9. Explain how you would teach about the concept of death to students in elementary school, junior high or middle school, high school, and college. Also indicate the kind of examples that would be most effective with each age group.

10. Defend or refute the contention that individuals who persistently hold on to the deceased should enter therapy.

RESEARCH PROJECTS

LIFE-SPAN DEVELOPMENT

Student Study Guide

Chapter 1

Research Project 1 Monitoring Contemporary Concerns in the Media

At the beginning of Chapter 1 Santrock asserts that today's media are concerned about such life-span developmental topics as health and well-being, parenting and education, sociocultural contexts, and social policy. Monitor a newspaper, radio news program, or television news program for a week and keep a record of stories that reflect each of these concerns. That is, search the paper for news items or listen to news broadcasts, and make a record of stories that reflect these concerns. When you are done, tally the number of stories that reflect each concern. Then write a brief report in which you answer the following questions.

Questions

1. What was the most frequently expressed concern?

2. Were the concerns you encountered m each category focussed on one particular kind of story? Or were there a number of different kinds of news items that reflected a variety of concerns within each category? Explain your answer.

3. Did the stories reflect a life-span perspective? Or did they reflect some other way of viewing the contemporary concerns? Explain your answer.

4. Can you find information in Life-Span Development that is related to each story and that helps you to understand it better? Explain your answer.

5. What information do you wish you had in order to understand the story better?

Research Project 2 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?