Human development
Unit 1: Meta-theories, what is development?
-> scientific study of the ways in which people change, as well as remain the same, from conception to
death.
Lifespan perspective:
Underlying principles of the lifespan perspective: Development is
1. lifelong
2. Multidirectional and multidimensional
3. Includes gains and losses
4. Characterized by plasticity
5. Embedded in historical/cultural context
6. Multiply determined (nature and nurture)
7. Multidisciplinary
Developmental systems of influence:
1. Normative age-graded influences: Social experiences/ biological changes
2. Normative history graded-influence: Time period in which you were born shapes experience.
-Cohort: People who are born at roughly the same period in a particular society.
3. Non-normative influences: Specific influences that aren’t organized by age/historical time
Domains of development:
1. Physical: Changes in height/weight/sensory capabilities/nervous system/disease
2. Cognitive: Change in intelligence/language etc.
3. Psychosocial: Change in emotion/self-perception/interpersonal relationships
Contextual perspective on development: Development depends on : 1. Socioeconomic status (SES),
2. Poverty level, 3. Culture: cultural relativity= appreciation for cultural differences and the
understanding that cultural practices are best understood from the stand point of that culture.
Life span: maximum age life expectancy: average
Conceptions of age:
-chronological: year-birth year
-biological: how quickly the body is aging
-psychological: psychological adaptive capacity compared to others of the same age
-social: based on social norms of out culture and expectations for our age
Age periods of development:
1. Prenatal: conception-birth
2. Infancy and toddlerhood: birth-2y/o
3. Early childhood: 2y/o-6y/o
4. Middle+late childhood: 6y/o-onset puberty
5. Adolescence: onset puberty-18y/o
6. Emerging adulthood: 18y/o-25y/o
7. Early adulthood: 25y/o-30y/o
8. Middle adulthood: 30y/o/-65y/o
9. Late adulthood: 65+
Meta-theories of human development:
Meta-theories have assumptions about:
1. Human nature: good/bad or clean slate
2. Causes of development: nature vs nurture
3. Role of individual: passive vs active
4. Stability vs change
5. Continuity vs discontinuity
,6. Universality vs context specifity
Theories and their metaphors:
1. Maturation theory: Humans are seeds: genetic make-up of a person, environment can’t change
somebodies nature.
2. Mechanistic theory: Humans are machines: people are passive, development is continuous and
environment decides everything
3. Organismic theory: humans are butterflies: development is discontinuous, environment aids
development, which is progressive and goes one way.
4. Contextual theory: Humans are a tennis game: development is based on activity between person
and environment.
historical theories about development:
1. Preformationism: children are small adults
2. John Locke: Tabula rasa, a child’s mind is a blank slate and they are formed by the environment
3. Jean-Jacques Roussea: development happens according to a natural plan.
4. Arnold Gesell: maturation happens in a fixed sequence
5. Freud: childhood makes us social beings.
Contemporary theories about development:
1. Psychosocial theory: there are 8 developmental stages, fostered by social relationships.
2. Behaviorism: only what can be observed
3. Social learning theory: Reciprocal determines: interplay between out personality and the way we
interpret events/how they influence us.
4. Cognitive theory: how our mental processes change over time
5. Ecological system theory: framework of influences on human development, micro-, meso-, exo-,
macro-, and chronosystem.
Unit 2: Research methods:
§2.1: How do we learn to promote development?:
Developmental practices: All the decisions/actions we take in our professional/personal lives that
shape our own/other’s development.
Science: Professional experience instead of personal experience-> limitations: implicit biases.
“best” practices for promoting development: lessons gained from scientific evidence and expert
practioners.
Strengths of science:
1. It’s a public enterprise
2. It’s inherently open
3. It critiques and reinvents itself
Shortcomings:
1.exclusion/distortion
2. People assume it has a monopoly on knowledge
3. Distortion of study of minority groups
4. Theories are based on underlying assumptions
§2.2: lifespan developmental research methodologies:
Types of methodologies:
1. Deductive: hypotheses-> observations, starts with theory
2. Inductive: starts with general question based on observations-> theory
3. Collaborative: collaboration between researchers and community.
Methods of gathering information (and their disadvantages)
1. Observations:
-Naturalistic: reactivity/ a lot of factors
-Lab: not able to generalize as well
-Video/audio: not complete
, -Local experts: biases
2. Self-reports: socially desirable
-Surveys: only surface info
-Interviews: reactivity
-Open-ended interviews: less comparable
-Focus groups
-Respond to a prompt
3. Psychological tests and assessments
4. Laboratory tasks
5. Psychophysiological assessment
6. Archival data/artifacts
7. Case study
§2.3: descriptive and explanatory designs:
Goals of lifespan development science:
Target=1.Normative change/stability and 2. Differential change and stability.
Goals: 1.Description: portraying patterns of development. Answer to “what”, ”how”, “when”-
questions.
2.Optimization: explicit accounts of the factors that cause/influence/produce the patterns of change
and stability that have been described. Answers “why”-questions.
Designs:
1.Descriptive developmental designs: when-question, cross-sectional, longitudinal and sequential.
2. Explanatory: how/where question: experimental/nature (lab vs field)
Describing development: Cross-sectional, longitudinal and sequential design:
1. Cross-sectional: collects information at one point in time of groups of people who differ in age.
Advantage: Information about wide range of ages in a short period of time and about differences in
groups.
Disadvantage: no information about change, because differences between groups van be due to
generational differences-> cohort effects: lifelong effects of belonging to a certain generation.
2. Longitudinal: examines one group repeatedly over multiple points in time.
Advantage: information about change/development/differences in pathways and may show if
experiences predict a certain outcome
Disadvantage: The changes in people could also be because of historical changes
3. Sequential: looking at age and historical changes for multiple cohorts-> cross-sequential design:
cross-sectional study combined with a longitudinal study.
Advantage: able to compare longitudinal changes across different cohorts
Disadvantage: complex
Explaining development: Experimental and naturalistic designs
Experimental designs: researcher decides the causal agent and who’ll get it.
1. Laboratory experiment: advantage for detecting causality
2. Naturalistic laboratory: in a lab, but no deciding the casual factor.
-> used for phenomena that can only be measured in a lab.
Advantage: control and precision
Disadvantage:-different context than real life-> alternation/distortion of the phenomena
-anything in the lab can be a cause
-time span of causal effects can’t be simulated
3. Field experiments: Advantage: it has the same advantages as a lab, but without the disadvantages
of the context
Disadvantage: -administration of causal factors is a little messy
-people can drop out
Unit 1: Meta-theories, what is development?
-> scientific study of the ways in which people change, as well as remain the same, from conception to
death.
Lifespan perspective:
Underlying principles of the lifespan perspective: Development is
1. lifelong
2. Multidirectional and multidimensional
3. Includes gains and losses
4. Characterized by plasticity
5. Embedded in historical/cultural context
6. Multiply determined (nature and nurture)
7. Multidisciplinary
Developmental systems of influence:
1. Normative age-graded influences: Social experiences/ biological changes
2. Normative history graded-influence: Time period in which you were born shapes experience.
-Cohort: People who are born at roughly the same period in a particular society.
3. Non-normative influences: Specific influences that aren’t organized by age/historical time
Domains of development:
1. Physical: Changes in height/weight/sensory capabilities/nervous system/disease
2. Cognitive: Change in intelligence/language etc.
3. Psychosocial: Change in emotion/self-perception/interpersonal relationships
Contextual perspective on development: Development depends on : 1. Socioeconomic status (SES),
2. Poverty level, 3. Culture: cultural relativity= appreciation for cultural differences and the
understanding that cultural practices are best understood from the stand point of that culture.
Life span: maximum age life expectancy: average
Conceptions of age:
-chronological: year-birth year
-biological: how quickly the body is aging
-psychological: psychological adaptive capacity compared to others of the same age
-social: based on social norms of out culture and expectations for our age
Age periods of development:
1. Prenatal: conception-birth
2. Infancy and toddlerhood: birth-2y/o
3. Early childhood: 2y/o-6y/o
4. Middle+late childhood: 6y/o-onset puberty
5. Adolescence: onset puberty-18y/o
6. Emerging adulthood: 18y/o-25y/o
7. Early adulthood: 25y/o-30y/o
8. Middle adulthood: 30y/o/-65y/o
9. Late adulthood: 65+
Meta-theories of human development:
Meta-theories have assumptions about:
1. Human nature: good/bad or clean slate
2. Causes of development: nature vs nurture
3. Role of individual: passive vs active
4. Stability vs change
5. Continuity vs discontinuity
,6. Universality vs context specifity
Theories and their metaphors:
1. Maturation theory: Humans are seeds: genetic make-up of a person, environment can’t change
somebodies nature.
2. Mechanistic theory: Humans are machines: people are passive, development is continuous and
environment decides everything
3. Organismic theory: humans are butterflies: development is discontinuous, environment aids
development, which is progressive and goes one way.
4. Contextual theory: Humans are a tennis game: development is based on activity between person
and environment.
historical theories about development:
1. Preformationism: children are small adults
2. John Locke: Tabula rasa, a child’s mind is a blank slate and they are formed by the environment
3. Jean-Jacques Roussea: development happens according to a natural plan.
4. Arnold Gesell: maturation happens in a fixed sequence
5. Freud: childhood makes us social beings.
Contemporary theories about development:
1. Psychosocial theory: there are 8 developmental stages, fostered by social relationships.
2. Behaviorism: only what can be observed
3. Social learning theory: Reciprocal determines: interplay between out personality and the way we
interpret events/how they influence us.
4. Cognitive theory: how our mental processes change over time
5. Ecological system theory: framework of influences on human development, micro-, meso-, exo-,
macro-, and chronosystem.
Unit 2: Research methods:
§2.1: How do we learn to promote development?:
Developmental practices: All the decisions/actions we take in our professional/personal lives that
shape our own/other’s development.
Science: Professional experience instead of personal experience-> limitations: implicit biases.
“best” practices for promoting development: lessons gained from scientific evidence and expert
practioners.
Strengths of science:
1. It’s a public enterprise
2. It’s inherently open
3. It critiques and reinvents itself
Shortcomings:
1.exclusion/distortion
2. People assume it has a monopoly on knowledge
3. Distortion of study of minority groups
4. Theories are based on underlying assumptions
§2.2: lifespan developmental research methodologies:
Types of methodologies:
1. Deductive: hypotheses-> observations, starts with theory
2. Inductive: starts with general question based on observations-> theory
3. Collaborative: collaboration between researchers and community.
Methods of gathering information (and their disadvantages)
1. Observations:
-Naturalistic: reactivity/ a lot of factors
-Lab: not able to generalize as well
-Video/audio: not complete
, -Local experts: biases
2. Self-reports: socially desirable
-Surveys: only surface info
-Interviews: reactivity
-Open-ended interviews: less comparable
-Focus groups
-Respond to a prompt
3. Psychological tests and assessments
4. Laboratory tasks
5. Psychophysiological assessment
6. Archival data/artifacts
7. Case study
§2.3: descriptive and explanatory designs:
Goals of lifespan development science:
Target=1.Normative change/stability and 2. Differential change and stability.
Goals: 1.Description: portraying patterns of development. Answer to “what”, ”how”, “when”-
questions.
2.Optimization: explicit accounts of the factors that cause/influence/produce the patterns of change
and stability that have been described. Answers “why”-questions.
Designs:
1.Descriptive developmental designs: when-question, cross-sectional, longitudinal and sequential.
2. Explanatory: how/where question: experimental/nature (lab vs field)
Describing development: Cross-sectional, longitudinal and sequential design:
1. Cross-sectional: collects information at one point in time of groups of people who differ in age.
Advantage: Information about wide range of ages in a short period of time and about differences in
groups.
Disadvantage: no information about change, because differences between groups van be due to
generational differences-> cohort effects: lifelong effects of belonging to a certain generation.
2. Longitudinal: examines one group repeatedly over multiple points in time.
Advantage: information about change/development/differences in pathways and may show if
experiences predict a certain outcome
Disadvantage: The changes in people could also be because of historical changes
3. Sequential: looking at age and historical changes for multiple cohorts-> cross-sequential design:
cross-sectional study combined with a longitudinal study.
Advantage: able to compare longitudinal changes across different cohorts
Disadvantage: complex
Explaining development: Experimental and naturalistic designs
Experimental designs: researcher decides the causal agent and who’ll get it.
1. Laboratory experiment: advantage for detecting causality
2. Naturalistic laboratory: in a lab, but no deciding the casual factor.
-> used for phenomena that can only be measured in a lab.
Advantage: control and precision
Disadvantage:-different context than real life-> alternation/distortion of the phenomena
-anything in the lab can be a cause
-time span of causal effects can’t be simulated
3. Field experiments: Advantage: it has the same advantages as a lab, but without the disadvantages
of the context
Disadvantage: -administration of causal factors is a little messy
-people can drop out
