Developmental Research

 Quiz is multiple choice and is timed – opens Thursday at 5pm

Scientific Method
1. Ask a question – identity variables (anything you can measure and compare to other
measured things) you are looking at (psychological, physical, psychophysiological)
2. Formulate a hypothesis – specific and estimated guess about our variables of interest
3. Select a method for collecting data – depends on our variable of interest

Representative sampling

 Should aim to get a representative sample

 On right side is represented by our population (age, gender, economic status, ethnicity)-
takes into consideration entire population
 When conducting a study, we aim to represent our entire population
 For example, try to represent population of Canada (use people of all backgrounds)
 On left side is represented by our sample – this is a smaller group to represent the
population of various genders, age, ethnicity, economic status

Reliability and Validity

Reliability: getting the same results every time
 .7 is ideal - .8 is good - .9+ is excellent
 Below .7 may have limited applicability
 Max reliability is 1, minimum is 0

Validity: how accurate are our results. Are we

measuring what we want to measure- reliability means nothing without validity

 Reliability – how close the points are together

 Validity: falling on the bullseye
Confounding variables need to be considered when conducting research
 You want independent variable to
predict the dependent variable without
outside variables affecting it as best as
possible
 ie, amount of caffeine consumed
(independent), number of words
recalled (dependent)- don’t want
outside variables (ie, time of day of
task, in what form was caffeine
consumed, etc.)
 You do NOT want confounding
variables getting in the way between independent and dependent variable

 Eliminate confounding variables via controlling the experiment as much as

possible (perhaps testing participants at same time of day, same room to
conduct experiment in, not distracted by outside noises, etc.)
 You can also control via statistics (measure time of day and remove variation in analysis)

Types of measurement
1. Systematic observation
 watching children and record what they say or
do
 Two types of systematic observation:

Naturalistic observation: behaviours observed in real – life situation
Example: children playing on their school playground and observing either via the naked eye or
video
Naturalistic observation methods:
 Time sampling: recording periods of time to determine if a behaviour happened or not
(positive affect and activity level) – needs to operationally define (ie, does boy smile in
first 10 seconds)
 Event sampling: researcher tallies behaviour of interest on a sheet (ie, does child play
with sand 5 times- in a certain period of time)

Structured observation: researcher creates setting likely to elicit behavior of interest

(some situations are un-common, thus researchers must make the situation)

 Example: child plays a few games; experimenter pretends to drop objects – likely
to elicit helping and observes actions and words of child (ie, how long it takes
child to help, what does child say, etc.)
 Or: stranger approach – experimenter leaves room and an unfamiliar person comes in
wearing a hat and sunglasses and this aims to elicit uncomfortableness and fear in the
child. Observe if child approaches or withdraws from stranger
Behavioral coding
 Operational definition: what
exactly does the behaviour
look like
Example: putting out a camera and
asking child to tell about their last
birthday experience. Told other boys
and girls their age will be watching
this – measures shyness

 One action indicative of shyness includes fidgeting (arms)

Systematic observations limitations

 Observer bias: researcher tends to notice behaviors that support the hypothesis and
discount those that do not, or interprets behaviors in such a way that they support
the hypothesis (ie, if researchers perceives child to be shy, they might code child to be
shy during video, even if they are not)
 Expectancy effect (type of observer bias): observer’s expectations influence their
observations (ie, researchers come in and shy, expect them to be shy in video and code them as
such)
 To get around expectancy effect: blinded and double blinded studies (coders don’t know
the hypothesis, or what the study is about at all)

Inter-rater reliability: reliability of behavior scores between two or more coders (at least 2
coders agree on at least 20% of participants and achieve a high enough coefficient on
reliability)- before you publish behaviour scores you must achieve inter-rater reliability (another
coder must code and agree with 20% of behaviour codes, and you must exhibit high reliability)

Observer influence: participants changes their behavior because they are being observed – we
can deal with this via habituation, one way mirror, or using cameras (CC TV cameras) so they
cannot see you
 Habituation: allows participants to get used to researcher’s presence, thus their
behaviour will be more natural (ie, go to classroom several times before actually
collecting data so that kids are used to you)

2. Parent repots and self-reports

 Parent reports: parents responses to questions
about topic of interest
 Self-reports: child’s own responses to questions
about topic of interest
 Response bias (mainly parents): participants
answer in a way that is more socially acceptable
(either comparing child to other siblings in the
family, or comparing to other children)- ie, parents
may not want to admit to certain things- child
aggression.
  Parents are a bit biased, don’t have same motives as researcher
 Need to use subscales, not all parts of the checklist are completely relevant.

Another example is the Colorado childhood temperament index (CCTI)

 6 subscales of emotions MIXED together to mask together variables of interest to avoid
bias
 Subscales: shyness, sociability, emotionality, soothability, attention span persistence,
activity level
 Create subscales with internal consistency
 Internal consistency: reliability across items on a scale of a questionnaire or interview
(make sure all the questions about a certain trait must be statistically tested to reliably
test the same thing)
 Mixed questions, parents don’t know what they are being questioned on
 Less bias

Reverse coding: method to mask the aim of the questionnaire or interview

 Another way to mask what we are testing, asking opposite of what we are testing or
reporting
 Question: “child takes a long time to warm up to strangers”
 Reverse coded question: “child makes friends very easily”

Harter Self-esteem Scale

 Earliest you’d do is 8 years old, even wait until

10
 For younger children use the picture above –
they identify with the person in the image
 Breaking the question up into two parts to make
it more adjustable, to make it easily understood
and digestible by children
 ie, this girl is good at puzzle, that girl is not, are you similar to which
 Then say are you really good or pretty good, or sort of good or not very good based on
first answer.

3. Sampling behavior with tasks

 Attempts to sample behaviors of interest when cannot be observed
 Example: memory task (spatial- fixate on screen, distraction, and have to remember
where dot was), emotion recognition task (based on image recognize what emotion is
shown)

4. Physiological Measures
 Heart rate variability – measure of self-regulation and attention (is there a lot of
variation in beats or little)
 Cortisol – stress hormone secreted during stress. Measured via saliva sample
 Skin conductance: strong emotion, attention (lie detection)- sweat from skin
 Blood volume and skin temperature: embarrassment, guilt, shame (use on cheeks to
 measure blushing)—pretty new

Drawbacks – time consuming with children, might take a long time for child to habituate,
expensive
 Electroencephalography (EEG): measuring the brain’s electrical activity from electrodes
placed on the scalp. Helps determine the region of the brain that regulates a certain
function
 More squiggles more activity, different squiggles, different site- some electrodes get
more activity
 Objective data is best (direct observation of children performing tasks and physiological
data)
– over subjective data (self-report, parent report)
 Eye gaze is a behavioral measure

Correlational vs Experimental design

Correlational study: relations between variables as they exist naturally in the world
(intelligence and ability to make friends- are they related to eachother)
 Correlation: direction and strength of a relation between two variables
 Correlation coefficient (r): ranges from -1 to +1)
 Positive correlation = 0 to +1 (increase in a variable result in an increase in the other)
 negative correlation= 0 to -1 (increase in a variable result in an decrease in the other)
 No correlation = 0
 Note: correlation is NOT the same as causation – just because the two is correlated does
not mean one causes the other

 Regression: estimate one variable on the basis of another – looks at cause and effect
rather than looking at two variables moving in the same direction and the same time
 Still a correlational design, relationship exists naturally
 X independent variable
 Y dependent variable
 How is X related to Y?
 Increase in X, leads to decrease in Y with more of a causation background

2 types of regression: moderation and mediation

 Moderation: X predicts Y differently at different levels of variable Z (third variable)
  Example of moderation graph, z is moderator
 Mediation: variable Z explains the relation between X and Y
Example: grades are predicting happiness. If you look at self-esteem however this better
explains the relation between grades and happiness (Z variable self-esteem- higher Z =
higher grades and happiness, etc.)

Experimental study:
 Factors systematically varied to cause particular behavior – children randomly assigned
to different groups or conditions
 Independent variable: group or condition
 Dependent variable: behaviour of
interest

Age related Changes

Cross-Sectional Design
 Testing children of different ages at one particular point of development (babies,
children, teenagers all tested in 2020)
 Advantage: less expensive, not time consuming
 Limitation: cannot study continuity of behavior (does intelligence change), cohort
effects (generational differences)- can’t see if in an specific individual intelligence
actually changes from infancy to 10 years old

Longitudinal Design
 Same individuals are observed or tested repeatedly at different points in their lives
 Advantages: no continuity of behavior
 Limitation: expensive, death of participants or bored (attrition-drop out of experiment),
practice effects
 Practice effect: the improvement over time might be attributed to practice with a
 particular test
 Selective attrition: those who drop out of the study may be significantly different from
participants who remain (children who find task difficult vs children finding task easy)

 Cohort effects: developmental change may be particular to specific generation of

people (ie, babies born today versus those 10 or 20 did go through pandemic)
• Cohort Longitudinal- all children have same/unique experience (ie,
pandemic) –cannot generalize to other generations

Combat practice and cohort - longitudinal sequential design: sequences of samples that are
studied longitudinally

 Accelerated longitudinal: cross sections are collected simultaneously to a longitudinal

group. Can look for practice effects (add cross sections of ither 10 years olds, etc.)

Ethics in Research – to respect our participants

 The monster study: looked at speaking fluency in children. Half were praised for
speaking fluency and other half were belittled. Those belittled underwent speech
problems that persisted into adulthood ( some children did not have a pre-existing
speech problem)- experiment caused speech problems
 Little albert study: classically conditioned to fear white and fluffy objects – had distress
in childhood and later. Albert’s mother was involved in the research and had lower
socioeconomic status and was pressured into letting her son participate (conflict of
interest perhaps)
 Gender reassignment at birth: Was born a boy and during circumcision the doctor
made an error accidently mutilated penis and pressured the parents to raise as a girl,
gender reassignment as a baby – doctors thought gender was the result of environment
and not biology alone, caused child lots of distress in his life, felt like he was in wrong
body)
Ethics in Research
1. Research that benefits humanity
2. Minimize risks – social (personal information of individual in study is leaked),
psychological (distress post experiment), physical
3. Avoid deception
4. Confidentiality and Anonymity (give participant a number rather than a name)
5. Voluntary withdrawal at any time
6. Debriefing (every time)
7. Informed Consent: informing legal guardian about full details of the study so that they
may make an educated decision
8. Assent: explaining procedures to the child in a way that they will understand
• Form below about how they feel (child-friendly questionnaire)
Wednesday, May 6th, 2020 Child Development 2AA3
Wednesday, May 6th, 2020 Child Development 2AA3
Wednesday, May 6th, 2020 Child Development 2AA3
Wednesday, May 6th, 2020 Child Development 2AA3
Wednesday, May 6th, 2020 Child Development 2AA3
Wednesday, May 6th, 2020 Child Development 2AA3