Chapter 1 - Intro to Child Dev't

Question 1

What are some reasons for learning about child development? (3)

Answer 1

• raising children
• choosing social policies
• understanding human nature

Question 2

What is a specific example of how studying child development has helped raise children?

Answer 2

studying ways to help children control their anger

Question 3

What are the researched methods found to help children better control their anger?

Answer 3

• offering sympathy
• finding positive alternatives to express anger (turtle method)

Question 4

What is a specific example of how studying child development has helped improve social policy?

Answer 4

Creating laws to help improve the quality of course testimonies given by children?

Question 5

What are the researched methods fund to yield accurate court testimonies from children?

Answer 5

Avoiding asking leading questions to children and instead asking neutral questions

Question 6

What is a specific example of how studying child development has helped improve our understanding of human nature?

Answer 6

studying how inadequate treatment of toddlers affects their development down the line

Question 7

What specific research/ findings were there about the long-lasting effects of children raised in inadequate conditions?

Answer 7

• The longer a child is living in inadequate conditions, the longer lasting the effects of the abuse are on the child
• less likely to end up developing “normally”

Question 8

List the enduring themes in child development.

Answer 8

1) Nature vs nurture
2) The Active Child
3) Continuity/ Discontinuity
4) Mechanisms of Development
5) Sociocultural Context

Question 9

Explain the Nature vs Nurture theme in child development.

Answer 9

• nature = one’s genes
• nurture = environment
• nature and nurture almost always interact with each other to evoke change/ development

Question 10

What is the heritability coefficient?

Answer 10

how much of the variation seen in a certain trait within a population can be attributed to genetic variation, as opposed to environment.

Question 11

What does a heritability coefficient of 0.7 mean?

Answer 11

• 70% of the variability in the trait in a population is due to genetic differences among people

Question 12

Explain the Active Child theme in child development.

Answer 12

• Investigates how children shape their own development
• this is done through how they control their environment

Question 13

What are some ways the “Active Child” is seen in different stages of child development

Answer 13

Newborns:
- prefer things that make noise
- prefer their mother’s face

Toddlers:
- motivated to learn/ practice speech
- use self-speech to practice language

Young Children:
- internally motivated play
- dramatic and fantasy play

Older Children:
- use organized play to control personal and social development

Question 14

Explain the Continuity/Discontinuity theme in child development.

Answer 14

• development can either be seen through the lense of being continuous or discontinuous
• the lense used to analyze development vastly influences the perspective of matter

Question 15

Explain the Mechanisms of Development theme in child development.

Answer 15

• looks at how interactions of genome and environment determine what changes and when

Question 16

What is effortful attention?

Answer 16

• ability to inhibit impulses which control emotions, focus, and attentions
• related to mechanism of development
• when do changes in attention happen?

Question 17

Explain the Sociocultural Context theme in child development.

Answer 17

• looks at how sociocultural context influences child development
• context influences every aspect of development

Question 18

What is reliability?

Answer 18

• measures how consistent independent measurements of a behavior are

Question 19

What is interrater reliability?

Answer 19

• level of agreement between 2 different people’s observations of the same thing

Question 20

What is test-test reliability?

Answer 20

• how similar a child’s performance is on two or more occasions
  (reliably getting the same answer from a test)

Question 21

What is validity?

Answer 21

how variables influence both the results of the research and the generalizability to the population at large.

Question 22

What is internal validity?

Answer 22

• the degree to which effects observed within experiments can be attributed to the intentionally manipulated variables

Question 23

What is external validity?

Answer 23

how generalizable are results to people outside of the study

Question 24

What are two methods used to study children?

Answer 24

interviews and observations

Question 25

What are the two types of interviews?

Answer 25

structured and clinical

Question 26

State and explain the two types of observation methods.

Answer 26

Naturalistic observation:
- observes behavior in an uncontrolled environment

Structured observation:
- observed behavior in controlled environment

Question 27

Are correlation and causation the same thing?

Answer 27

no

Question 28

What is correlation?

Answer 28

how variables are related to one another

Question 29

What is positive vs negative correlation

Answer 29

Positive correlation:
- variables move in same direction

Negative correlation:
- variables move in opposite directions

Question 30

What are some reasons for not knowing casual directions in correlational studies?

Answer 30

• the 3rd variable problem
• unknown direction of cause

Question 31

What are some essential characteristics to define in experiential designs? (5)

Answer 31

1) random assignment of participants to groups
2) experimental control
3) inference about causes and effects allowed
4) operational definitions
5) control of confounding variables
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Question 32

What are 4 types of sampling? Which 2 are bad to use?

Answer 32

1) random sampling
2) stratified sampling
3) volunteer sampling
4) opportunity sampling

• volunteer and opportunity sampling are bad sampling methods