Chapter 1 Fundamentals

January 23, 2018 | Author: Anonymous | Category: Social Science, Psychology, Conformity
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CHAPTER 1 FUNDAMENTALS Instructor: Roberto L. Rinaldi PhDc Course: SOP 3015 Social & Personality Development

Key Terms Development: The systematic continuities and changes in the individual that occur between conception and death.  Socialization: The process by which individuals acquire the beliefs, values, and behaviors, considered desirable or appropriate by their culture or subculture. 

Key Terms 





Personality: a dynamic and organized set of characteristics possessed by a person that uniquely influences his or her cognitions, motivations, and behaviors in various situations. The word "personality" originates from the Latin persona, which means mask. Significantly, in the theatre of the ancient Latinspeaking world, the mask was not used as a plot device to disguise the identity of a character, but rather was a convention employed to represent or typify that character

The Universal Parenting Machine The universal parenting machine, a hypothetical thought experiment in which children are raised with peers and without parents or a prevailing culture, provides an interesting context for thinking about the processes and products of normal social and personality development.  An experiment such as this would require several questions to be developed and investigated. 

The Universal Parenting Machine 







Would these children interact w/one another & become sociable creatures? Would these children love, depend, or develop stable friendships? Would the children ever develop a spoken language or some other efficient method of communication? Would the environment provide rich stimulation needed for intellectual development?

The Universal Parenting Machine 







Would the children develop gender roles and/or become sexual beings? Would they develop a sense of pride in their accomplishments? Would the interactions be benevolent (cooperation, altruistic) or belligerent (aggressive or antagonistic)? Would they develop standards of good and evil or right and wrong to govern day-to-day interactions?

So How Would It Turn Out? We can’t be absolutely sure!  There is at least one case in which a small group of Jewish war orphans did indeed form their own “society” in the absence of adult supervision while in a German prison camp during WWII. (Chapter 13)  So where do we turn to develop some predictions about the outcome of this experiment? 

Historical Perspective 





Childhood and Adolescence were not always regarded as the special and sensitive periods we know them to be today. In the early days of recorded history, children had few if any rights, and their lives were not always valued by the elders. Children were killed as religious sacrifice and even embedded in the walls of buildings to “strenghten” their structures.

Historical Perspective 





Roman parents were legally entitled to kill their deformed, illegitimate, or otherwise unwanted infants, and even after this practice was outlawed, unwanted babies were left to die in the wilderness or sold as servants. During the 17th and 18th centuries, attitudes about children and child rearing began to change. Religious leaders of that era stressed that children were fragile creatures of God who should be shielded from the wild and wanton behavior of adults.

Historical Perspective 





So during the 17th and 18th centuries came a more humane outlook on children, and shortly thereafter some parents began to record the development of their infant sons and daughters in baby biographies. Baby Biography: A detailed record of an infant’s growth and development over a period of time. Perhaps the most influential of the baby biographers was Charles Darwin, who made daily records of the early development of his son.

Psychology of Childhood 



The scientific study of development did not emerge until nearly 1900, as G. Stanley Hall, in the United States, and Sigmund Freud, in Europe, began to collect data and formulate theories about human development. Soon, other researchers were deriving hypotheses and conducting research to evaluate and extend early theories.

Psychology of Childhood Theory: A set of concepts and propositions designed to organize, describe, and explain an existing set of observations.  Hypothesis: A theoretical prediction about some aspect of experience.  Theories are particularly useful when they are parsiminious, falsifiable, and heuristic. 

Role of Theory in the Scientific Enterprise 





Parsimony: A parsimonious theory is one that uses relatively few explanatory principles to explain a broad set of observations. Falsifiability: A theory is falsifiable when it is capable of generating predictions that could be disconfirmed. Heuristic-Value: An heuristic theory is one that continues to stimulate new research and new discoveries.

Questions and Controversy 

Development theorists have different points of view on at least five basic issues:  Are

children inherently good or inherently bad?  Is nature or nurture the primary influence on human development?  Are children actively involved in the development process or passive recipients of social and biological influences?  Is development continuous or discontinuous?  Are aspects of development universals that all humans display or are the particularistic?

Different Philosophical Views of Child in 17th-18th Century Hobbes: “original sin” (children born in sin). Pessimistic view of human nature: Influenced Freud. Locke: " tabula rasa") (need to mold child). Mechanistic view: Development is product of experience. Influenced learning theory (Watson, Skinner). Rousseau: "innate purity” (let child develop freely). Organismic view: Development is product of child's own activity, guided by internal program. Influenced cognitive developmental theory (Piaget).

Research Methods 





Today’s developmentalists, guided by the scientific method, allow objective data to determine the adequacy of their thinking. Acceptable research methods are those that possess both reliability and validity. A method is reliable if it produces consistent, replicable results; it is valid if it accurately reflects what it was intended to measure.

Data Collection 



The most common methods of data collection in the field of social and personality development are self-reports, observational methodologies, case studies, and ethnography. Self-reports include standardized procedures, such as structured interviews or structured questionnaires (including diary studies), that allow direct comparisons among research participants, and flexible approaches like the clinical method, which yields an individualized portrait of each participant’s feelings, thoughts, and behaviors.

Data Collection 



Structured interviews or structured questionnaires: A technique in which all participants are asked the same questions in precisely the same order. Diary Study: A self-report methodology in which participants respond to standardized questions, in a diary or notebook, at a specific time or whenever they are instructed to respond by prompt from an electronic pager.

Data Collection 

Clinical Method: A type of interview in which a participant’s response to each successive question (or problem) determines what the investigator will ask next.

Observational Methodologies 





Naturalistic observations are obtained in the natural environments of children or adolescents, whereas structured observations take place in laboratories where the investigator cues the behavior of interest. Observer Influence: Tendency of participants to react to an observer’s presence by behaving in unusual ways. Time Sampling: A procedure in which an investigator records frequencies of a behavior in the time the participant is being observed.

Observational Methodologies 



Structured Observation: An observation method in which the investigator cues the behvior of interest and observes participants’ responses in a laboratory setting. Case studies allow investigators to obtain an indepth understanding of individual children or adolescents by collecting data based on interviews, observations, and test scores of the individual in question, as well as information about that person from such knowledgeable sources as teachers and parents.

Observational Methodologies 



Ethnography, used originally by anthropologists, is a descriptive procedure in which the researcher becomes a participant observer within a cultural or subcultural context. He or she will carefully observe the community members, make notes from conversations, and compile such information into a detailed portrait of the group’s values and traditions and their impacts on developing children and adolescents.

Observational Methodologies 





In recent years, developmentalists have turned to psychophysiological methods. Psychophysiological methods measure the relationship between physiological responses and behavior. They are often used to reveal the biological underpinnings of children’s perceptual, cognitive, or emotional responses.

DETECTING RELATIONSHIPS: CORRELATIONAL AND EXPERIMENTAL DESIGNS 



Once researchers have decided what they want to study and how they will collect their data, they must then formulate a research plan, or design, that permits them to identify associations among events and behaviors and to specify the causes of these relationships. Two general research designs permit researchers to identify relationships among variables that interest them.

Correlational Design 







Correlational designs examine relationships as they naturally occur, without any intervention. The correlation coefficient is used to estimate the strength and magnitude of the association between variables. However, correlational studies cannot specify whether correlated variables are causally related. Correlation does not infer causation!

Experimental Design 



The experimental design does point to cause-andeffect relationships. The experimenter manipulates one (or more) independent variables, exercises experimental control over all other confounding variables (often by random assignment of participants to treatments), and observes the effect(s) of the manipulation(s) on the dependent variable.

Experimental Design 







IV: The aspect of the environment that an experimenter modifies or manipulates in order to measure its impact on behavior. DV: The aspect of behavior that is measured in an experiment and assumed to be under the control of the IV. Confounding Variable: Some factor other than the IV. Not controlled for. Random Assignment: Assignment to experiment conditions through an unbiased procedure.

Experimental Design 





Experiments may be performed in the laboratory or, alternatively, in the natural environment (that is, a field experiment), thereby increasing the ecological validity of the results. The impact of events that researchers cannot manipulate or control can be studied in natural (quasi) experiments. However, lack of control over natural events prevents the quasi-experimenter from drawing definitive conclusions about cause and effect.

Designs For Studying Development 



Cross-sectional, longitudinal, and sequential designs are employed to detect developmental change. The cross-sectional design, which compares different age groups at a single point in time, is easy to conduct; but it cannot tell us how individuals develop, and its results may be misleading if the age trends one observes are actually due to cohort effects rather than true developmental change.

Designs For Studying Development 





The longitudinal design detects developmental change by repeatedly examining the same participants as they grow older. Though it identifies developmental continuities and changes and individual differences in development, the longitudinal design is subject to such problems as selective attrition, which results in nonrepresentative samples. Moreover, the cross-generational problem of longterm longitudinal studies implies that results may be limited to the particular cohort studied.

Designs For Studying Development 



The sequential design, a combination of the crosssectional and longitudinal designs, offers researchers the advantages of both approaches and allows them to discriminate true developmental trends from troublesome cohort effects. The microgenetic design studies children intensively over a brief period when developmental changes normally occur in an attempt to specify how or why these changes occur.

Cross Cultural Comparisons 



Cross-cultural studies, in which participants from different cultures or subcultures are compared on one or more aspects of development, are becoming increasingly important. Only by comparing people from many cultures can we identify “universal” patterns of development and at the same time demonstrate that other aspects of development are heavily influenced by the social context in which they occur.

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