Understanding Life-Span Human
Development
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Defining Development
• Development definition
– Systematic changes and continuities in the
individual that occur between conception and
death
• Physical development
• Cognitive development
• Psychosocial development
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Defining Development further
• Growth
– Physical changes that occur from conception to
maturity
• Biological aging
– Deterioration of organisms that leads to death
– Gain-stability-loss
• Aging in other areas
– Physical, cognitive, and psychosocial changes,
positive and negative, in the mature organism
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An Overview of Periods of the Life Span
These are the
names given to
the various age
groups. They
will shift as our
development
changes. For
example, in the
1700s, when
did adulthood
start?
Regardless of
what this chart
says, when do
you think
adulthood
starts in our
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generations?
Cultural Differences
• Age means different things in different
societies
• Age grade (also known as age cohorts)
– Socially defined age group in a society
– Assigned different roles, responsibilities, statuses,
privileges
• Separating children into grades in school based on age
• Adults granted voting privileges
• Sometimes these can seem arbitrary, even though they
are usually shaped by the culture (Why can you fight a
war at 18, but©not drink
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Learning. 21?)
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Cultural Differences
• Rite of passage
– Ritual that marks a person’s “passage” from one
status to another
• Body painting
• Bar or bat mitzvahs (Jewish)
• Quinceañera (Hispanic American girls)
• driving a car
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Cultural Differences
• Age norms
– Society’s way of telling people how to act their age
– Influence people’s decisions about how to lead
their lives
– this shifts as the culture shifts (What would you
think of a 70 year old woman wearing a miniskirt?)
• Social clock
– Person’s sense of when things should be done and
when he or she is ahead of or behind the schedule
dictated by age norms
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Subcultural Differences
• Ethnicity
– People’s classification or affiliation with a group
based on common heritage or traditions
• Socioeconomic status (SES)
– Standing in society based on occupational
prestige, education, and income
• Individuals from lower-income families tend to
reach milestones of adulthood earlier (most
often because they must care for the younger
siblings) © 2015. Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.
Subcultural Differences
• Poverty can be damaging to human
development
– 2010 22% of children in US lived below the
poverty line
– Lower academic achievement, poorer mental
health and wellbeing
– Increased stress
• Noise, crowding, family disruption, hunger, exposure to
violence
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Historical Changes
• Childhood
– Children come to be viewed as different from adults in 17th
century ; before then, children were actually viewed as
miniature adults
• Adolescence
– Recognized as a distinct phase of the life span in 18th
century. It's been expanded as college becomes a necessity
• Old age
– Defined old age as a period of retirement in 20th century
– retirement is moving later, due to Social Security changes
as well as living longer
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Historical Changes
• In early 21st century, life expectancy is 78 years
compared to 47 in 1900
• Current stats: 81 for women, 79 for men (men
tend to take more risks generally)
• By 2030, 20% of US population will be 65 and
older; Japan already is having trouble due to
an increase in elder people
• Age has had different meanings in different
historical eras
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• Here is an article from the Census Bureau
about the elder population trend:
• [Link]
2018/03/[Link]
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Framing the Nature–Nurture Issue
• Nature–nurture
– How biological forces and environmental forces
act and interact to make us what we are
• Nature
– Some aspects of development are inborn or
innate, others are the product of maturation
• Nurture
– Change in response to environment or learning
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The Language of Nature and Nurture
• Developmental changes are the products of a
complex interplay between nature and
nurture
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• Update on the nature-nurture debate:
• [Link]
nature-versus-nurture-2795392
• bottom line: it's complicated.
• consider this: Intelligence is more determined
by heredity in a group that has lots of money
(and can all get the best tutors), but it is more
determined by environment in a poor group
(where not everyone can afford a tutor)
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Goals and Uses of Studying
Development
• Goals of life-span development
– Description
– Prediction
– Explanation
– Optimization
• Evidence-based practice
– Based on research and ensuring treatments they
provide have been demonstrated to be effective
– we should use research and treatments that have
good evidence for them whenever possible
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• Even though they are changing every day, do
you know the current evidence based
practices for preventing or treating Covid 19?
• As of this slide edit:
• preventing: social distancing and masks
• treatment: ventilators (used carefully),
proning (moving someone to lay on their side
or stomach), a few drugs for more severe
cases
• the malaria drug you've heard about doesn't
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Early Beginnings
• Baby biographies
– Scholars observe the growth and development of
their own children
– Biographies were difficult to compare
– Not generalizable to other children
– biased because many used their own kids; but
they gave us ideas about what to study
• G Stanley Hall
– Founder of developmental psychology
– Termed adolescence storm and stress
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• Hall may or may not have been right about
adolescence. Read the below link for some
ideas about this (hint: culture plays a role
here)
• [Link]
Teenage_rebellion
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The Modern Life-Span Perspective
• Baltes on life-span development
– Lifelong process
– Multidirectional
– Involves both gain and loss
– Characterized by lifelong plasticity
• Capacity to change in response to experience
• Think of plasticity as being able to change what you do
because of stress or issues. Were you plastic enough to
adjust to social distancing? (that does not mean you
had to do it without help. Sometimes plasticity means
knowing when you need a hand)
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The Modern Life-Span Perspective
• Baltes on life-span development
– Shaped by its historical–cultural context
– Product of nature and nurture
– Must be studied by multiple disciplines
– Most developmental psychologists agree with this
view today
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The Scientific Method
• Scientific method
– Belief that investigators should allow their
systematic observations determine the merits of
their thinking
– Involves generating ideas and testing them by
making observations
• Theory
– Propositions intended to describe and explain
certain phenomena
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The Scientific Method
• Hypotheses
– Predictions regarding a particular set of
observations
• A good theory should be:
– Internally consistent (doesn't contradict itself)
– Falsifiable (can be proven false)
– Supported by data
– can be changed or adapted as the data suggests
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The Scientific Method in Action
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• you have the theory 'Blonds have more fun.'
• you take blonds and brunettes to an
amusement park. Afterwards, you give them a
survey.
• You find that only blonds who are tall have
more fun at the amusement park. How does
this change your theory?
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Sample Selection
• Sample
– Group of individuals studied
• Random sampling
– Identifies all members of the larger population
and randomly selects a portion of that population
to study
– Increases confidence that the sample studied is
representative of the larger population
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Data Collection
• Three major types of data collection
– Verbal reports
– Behavioral observations
– Physiological measurements
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Data Collection
• Verbal reports involve asking people questions
about themselves or others
– Interviews
– Written questionnaires or surveys
– Ability and achievement tests
– Personality scales
• Cannot be used with certain populations (try
asking a child why they like ice cream)
• Social desirability (giving an expected answer.
Do you recycle? Of course I do!)
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Data Collection
• Behavioral observations
– Naturalistic observation observing people in their
everyday surroundings
• Used to study children often
• Some behaviors occur too infrequently and
unexpectedly to be observed
• Difficult to pinpoint the causes of the behavior
observed
• Observer presence can sometimes make people behave
differently (kids act like angels when the principal walks
into the classroom)
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Data Collection
• Behavioral observations
– Structured observations
• Achieve greater control over the conditions
• Create special stimuli, tasks, or situations designed to
elicit the behavior of interest
• Will research participants behave naturally?
• Will behavior generalize to behavior in the real world?
The real world is unstructured, so the behavior may
look different there.
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Data Collection
• Physiological measurements
– Example: Functional magnetic resonance imaging
(fMRI)
• Measures increase in blood flow to an area of the brain
that occurs when that brain area is active
• Hard to fake
• Useful in the study of infants
• Not always clear exactly about what is being assessed
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The Case Study, Experimental, and
Correlational Methods
• Case study
– In-depth examination of an individual or a small
number of individuals
– Can complement correlational and experimental
research
– Can be a good source of hypotheses
– Can provide a rich picture of atypical development
– May not generalize to other individuals
– There were a lot of case studies of Covid 19 in
March. They helped researchers guess what other
patients might go through.
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The Case Study, Experimental, and
Correlational Methods
• Experimental method
– Investigator manipulates some aspect of the
environment to see how this affects the behavior
of the sample of individuals studied. Experiments
have IVs and DVs.
• Independent variable (IV)
– Variable that is manipulated so that its causal
effects can be assessed
• Dependent variable (DV)
– Variable expected to be affected, measured
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The Case Study, Experimental, and
Correlational Methods
• Three critical features of a true experiment
– Random assignment of participants to different
experimental conditions
– Manipulation of the IV
– Experimental control
• All factors other than the independent variable are
controlled or held constant
• If I test whether heat affects anger, I will test people
using one room so everyone is exposed to the same
bright walls. I will only change the temperature in the
room.
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The Case Study, Experimental, and
Correlational Methods
• Strengths of the experimental method
– Can establish that one thing causes another
– Contribute to our ability to explain human
development
• Limitations
– Results may not hold in real world settings
– Often cannot be used for ethical reasons (We
cannot test whether smoking causes lung cancer
directly. Because if we think it does, it would be
wrong to force people to smoke)
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The Case Study, Experimental, and
Correlational Methods
• Correlational method
– Determine whether two or more variables are
related in a systematic way
– No random assignment or manipulation of IV
– Calculate correlation coefficient
• Index of the strength of the relationship between two
variables of interest
• Ranges from +1.00 to -1.00
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The Case Study, Experimental, and
Correlational Methods
• Rival interpretations in correlational studies
– Directionality problem
• Direction of the cause–effect relationship could be the
reverse. (Does watching more tv cause you to do less
homework or does doing less homework cause you to
watch more tv?)
– Third variable problem
• The association between the two variables of interest
may be caused by some third variable
• Cannot establish a causal relationship
between one variable and another
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A Comparison of the Experimental
Method and the Correlational Method
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Third variable problem example
• The consumption of ice cream (pints per
person) and the number of murders in New
York are positively correlated (by time period).
That is, as the amount of ice cream sold per
person increases, the number of murders
increases.
• Take a guess as to what the third variable is in
this correlation. If you can't figure it out, ask in
the class meeting!
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The Case Study, Experimental, and
Correlational Methods
• Meta-analysis
– Results of multiple studies addressing the same
question are synthesized to produce overall
conclusions
– Aids in the confidence of research findings
– meta analyses are useful for showing trends
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Developmental Research Designs
• Cross-sectional design
– People of different age groups are compared
– Provides information about age differences
• Age effects
– Relationship between age and development
• Cohort effects
– Effects of being born as a member of a particular
generation in a particular historical context
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Developmental Research Designs
• Cross-sectional design
– Age effects and cohort effects are confounded
(confused)
– Cohort differences can tell us about the influence
of the sociocultural environment on development
– Researchers learn nothing about how people
change with age
– Quicker and easier than longitudinal studies
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Developmental Research Designs
• Longitudinal design
– One cohort of individuals is assessed repeatedly
over time
– Provides information about age changes rather
than age differences
– Can indicate whether the characteristics and
behaviors measured remain consistent over time
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Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal
Studies of Development
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Developmental Research Designs
• Disadvantages of longitudinal designs
– Age effects and time-of-measurement effects are
confounded
– Time consuming and costly
– Measurement methods that seemed good at the
start of the study may seem dated by the end
– Participants drop out of long-term studies
– May be effects of repeated testing
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Developmental Research Designs
• Sequential design
– Combines cross-sectional approach and
longitudinal approach in a single study
– Can reveal
• Which age-related trends are developmental in nature
• Which age trends differ from cohort to cohort
• Time-of-measurement effects
– Very complex and expensive
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Cross-Sectional, Longitudinal, and
Sequential Developmental Designs
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Conducting Culturally Sensitive
Research
• Researchers must:
– Ensure procedures are meaningful in each culture
and mean the same thing across different
subcultural and cultural groups
– Work to keep their own cultural values from
biasing their perceptions
– it is often helpful to include cultural experts in
planning research so your own biases don't hurt
your research
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Protecting the Rights of Research
Participants
• Research ethics
– Standards of conduct to protect research
participants from physical or psychological harm
– Federal regulations require organizations that
conduct research with humans to have
institutional review boards
– Ethics overview:
[Link]
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Protecting the Rights of Research
Participants
• Informed consent
– Must be voluntary
– Obtain at least the “assent” or agreement of the
individual in vulnerable populations
– Must not to pressure anyone to participate
– Must respect participants’ right to:
• Refuse to participate
• Drop out during the study
• Refuse to have their data used by the investigator
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Protecting the Rights of Research
Participants
• Debriefing
– Tell participants about the study afterward if they
are not told everything in advance or are deceived
– Explain the true purpose of the study
– Obligation to make sure that participants do not
leave feeling upset
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Protecting the Rights of Research
Participants
• Protection from harm
– Researchers are bound to not harm research
participants either or psychologically
– If harm seems likely, researcher needs to find
another method
– Federal regulations provide extra protection from
harm to children
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Protecting the Rights of Research
Participants
• Confidentiality
– Ethical responsibility to keep the information
collected confidential
– Information collected can be shared only if:
• Participants give explicit permission
• Law requires disclosure of information
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