Lifespan Development

Module 1: Lifespan Development

Module Learning Outcomes

1.0 Explain the primary topics of lifespan development and how research is
conducted in the field

1.1: Define human development and identify the stages of human development
1.2: Explain the lifespan perspective
1.3: Examine how to do research in lifespan development
Introducing Human Development
Learning Outcomes:
Introducing Human Development
1.1: Define human development and identify the stages of human development

1.1.1: Describe human development and its three domains: physical, cognitive,
and psychosocial development

1.1.2: Explain key human development issues about the nature of change:
continuous/discontinuous, one course/multiple courses, and nature/nurture

1.1.3: Describe the basic periods of human development

Domains in Human Development: Physical

• Physical Domain Includes:

• Height
• Weight
• Fine and gross motor skills
• Brain development
• Puberty
• Sexual health
• Fertility and menopause
• Changes in our senses
• Primary and secondary aging
Domains in Human Development: Cognitive

• Cognitive Domain Includes:

• Language development
• Thinking (e.g., logical thinking, abstract reasoning)
• Learning and understanding
• Memory abilities
• Moral reasoning
• Practical intelligence
• Wisdom
Domains in Human Development: Psychosocial

• Psychosocial Domain Includes:

• Psychological and social development
• Temperament and attachment
• Emotions
• Personality
• Self-esteem
• Relationships
• Identity development
• Dating, romance, cohabitation, marriage, and having children
• Finding work or a career
• Caregiving, retirement, coping with losses, and death and dying
Key Human Development Issues: Continuous or
Discontinuous
• Continuous
• Development is a cumulative process
• Gradually improve on existing skills
• Discontinuous
• Development occurs in unique stages
• Development at specific times or ages
Key Human Development Issues: One Course or Many
Courses

• One Course
• Development is essentially the same for all
• Development is universal
• Stage theories

• Many Courses
• Development follows a different course for each child, depending on the
child’s specific genetics, environment, and culture
Key Human Development Issues: Nature versus Nurture

• Known in psychology as the Nature versus Nurture Debate

• Nature: Biology and genetics
• Nurture: Environment (e.g., parents, peers) and culture

• Interaction between genes and environment

• Both shape who we become
• There is continued debate about the relative contributions of each
Basic Periods of Human Development
• Prenatal Development: germinal, embryonic, and fetal periods
• Infancy and Toddlerhood: the first two years
• Early Childhood: Ages 2 to 5 or 6
• Middle Childhood: Ages 6 to 11
• Adolescence: Ages 12 to 18
• Early Adulthood: late teens, twenties and thirties
• Middle Adulthood: late thirties (or age 40) through the mid-60s
• Late Adulthood:
• “young old” (65-74 years old)
• “old old” (75-84 years old)
• “oldest old” (85+ years old)
Practice Question 1

The _______ of human development involves one’s feelings, relationships, identity,

and personality.

A. physical domain
B. cognitive domain
C. psychosocial domain
D. lifespan domain
Practice Question 2

Which period of development involves developing independence and feeling like an

adult?

A. Adolescence
B. Early adulthood
C. Middle adulthood
D. Late adulthood
The Lifespan Perspective
Learning Outcomes: The Lifespan Perspective

1.2: Explain the lifespan perspective

1.2.1: Describe Baltes' lifespan perspective with its key principles about
development (lifelong, multidimensional, multidirectional, plastic, contextual,
and multidisciplinary)

1.2.2: Explain what is meant by development being lifelong, multidimensional,

and multidirectional

1.2.3: Explain contextual influences on development

Baltes’ Lifespan Perspective

• Lifespan development: the biological, cognitive, and psychosocial changes and

constancies that occur throughout the entire course of life

• Lifespan Perspective: an approach to studying lifespan development attributed

to Paul Baltes, a German psychologist and leading expert on lifespan
development and aging
Baltes’ Lifespan Perspective: Key Principles

● Development occurs across one’s entire life or is lifelong

● Development is multidimensional
● Development is multidirectional and results in gains and losses throughout life
● Development is plastic, meaning that characteristics are malleable or
changeable
● Development is influenced by contextual and socio-cultural influences
● Development is multidisciplinary
Development is Lifelong

Development occurs across one’s entire life or is lifelong

• Development encompasses the entire lifespan, from conception to death
• Traditional view:
• focused on conception to adolescence and the gradual decline in old age
• It was believed that the five or six decades after adolescence yielded little to
no developmental change at all
• Current view: changes in development can occur later in life, without having
been established at birth
Development is Multidimensional

Development is multidimensional
• A complex interaction of biological, cognitive, and socioemotional changes
influence development across the lifespan
• Example of puberty in adolescence:
• Physiological/physical changes in hormone levels, primary and secondary
sex characteristics, changes in height and weight
• Cognitive changes in terms of the ability to think abstractly
• Emotional and social changes involving regulating emotions, interacting
with peers, and possibly dating
Development is Multidirectional

Development is multidirectional and results in gains and losses throughout life

• We have the capacity for both an increase and decrease in the efficacy of certain traits
over the course of the lifespan
• Selective optimization with compensation: prioritizing and improving the efficacy
of particular functions, thereby reducing the adaptive capacity of other functions
• Example:
• Childhood: difficulty with regulating emotions and impulsive actions
• Adolescence: increased ability to regulate emotions and impulses, but they may
sacrifice spontaneity, creativity, or fast responding
Development is Plastic

Development is plastic, meaning that characteristics are malleable or changeable

• The nature of human development is more pluralistic than originally thought;
there is no single pathway in development
• Consider the example of cognitive decline in aging
• Dimensions of cognitive decline are partially reversible because the brain
retains the lifelong capacity for plasticity and reorganization of cortical
tissue
• Research suggests that cognitive function, such as memory, can be improved
in mature adults with age-related cognitive decline by using brain plasticity-
based training methods
Development is Contextual

Development is influenced by contextual and socio-cultural influences

• Development varies from person to person, depending on factors such as a
person’s biology, family, school, church, profession, nationality, and ethnicity
• Three types of contextual influences operate across the lifespan:
• normative age-graded influences
• normative history-graded influences
• nonnormative influences
Normative Age-Graded Influences

• Biological and environmental factors that have a strong correlation with

chronological age, such as puberty or menopause

• Age-based social practices such as beginning school or entering retirement

Normative History-Graded Influences

• Associated with a specific time period that defines the broader environmental
and cultural context in which an individual develops
• Development and identity are influenced by historical events that people
experience. For example,
• Great Depression
• WWII
• The Vietnam War
• The Cold War
• The War on Terror
• Advances in technology
Nonnormative Influences

• Unpredictable and not tied to a certain time in a person’s development or to a

historical period
• The unique experiences of an individual, whether biological or environmental,
that shape the development process
• Examples of nonnormative influences:
• Earning a master’s degree
• Getting a certain job offer
• Going through a divorce
• Coping with the death of a child
Class Activity: Contextual Influences on Your Development

1. Get into groups of four or more and discuss the following three types of
contextual influences on your own development, with special attention to
cognitive and psychosocial domains:
a. Age-based social practices, such as when you started college (age-graded
influences)
b. Historical events that have shaped your development (history-graded
influences)
c. Unique life experiences that have influenced your development
(nonnormative influences)
2. Listen for commonalities and differences in your group
3. Share your observations with the class
Other Contextual Influences: Cohort

• Cohort: a group of people who are born at roughly the same time period in a
particular society

• Members of a cohort experience the same historical events and cultural climates
which influence their values, priorities, and goals
Other Contextual Influences: Socioeconomic Status

• Socioeconomic Status or Social Class: a way to identify families and

households based on their shared levels of education, income, and occupation

• Members of a social class tend to share similar lifestyles, patterns of

consumption, parenting styles, stressors, religious preferences, and other aspects
of daily life (although there are individual variations)
Other Contextual Influences: Culture

• Often referred to as a blueprint shared by a group of people that specifies how to

live
• Culture includes ideas about the following:
• what is right and wrong
• what to strive for
• what to eat
• how to speak
• what is valued
• what kinds of emotions are called for in certain situations
• Culture is learned from parents, schools, churches, media, friends, and others
throughout a lifetime
Other Contextual Influences: Culture continued

• Ethnocentrism: the belief that our own culture’s practices and expectations are
the right ones or are superior
• This is a normal byproduct of growing up in a culture
• It becomes a roadblock when it inhibits understanding of cultural practices
from other societies

• Cultural relativity: an appreciation for cultural differences and the

understanding that cultural practices are best understood from the standpoint of
that particular culture
Development is Multidisciplinary

Development is multidisciplinary
• Any one discipline would not be able to account for all aspects of lifespan
development
• Lifespan researchers state that it takes a combination of disciplines to
understand development:
• Psychologists
• Sociologists
• Neuroscientists
• Anthropologists
• Educators
• Economists
• Historians
• Medical researchers
Practice Question 3

Brain training programs capitalize on the brain’s lifelong capacity to reorganize

cortical tissue, which aligns with Baltes’ key principle of lifespan development that
_______.

A. development is plastic
B. development is multidimensional
C. development is multidirectional
D. development is lifelong
Practice Question 4

Millennials, those born between 1982 and 2000, are considered tech-savvy because
they grew up with technology and rely on it for daily activities. Which of Baltes’
contextual influences does this represent?

A. Normative age-graded influences

B. Normative history-graded influences
C. Nonnormative influences
D. Normative contextual influences
Research in Lifespan Development
Learning Outcomes: Research in Lifespan Development

1.3: Examine how to do research in lifespan development

1.3.1: Explain the value of the scientific method in researching development

1.3.2: Compare various types and objectives of developmental research

1.3.3: Describe methods for collecting research data (including observation,

survey, case study, content analysis, and secondary content analysis)
Learning Outcomes: Research in Lifespan Development
(cont.)
1.3: Examine how to do research in lifespan development, continued

1.3.4: Explain Correlational Research

1.3.5: Describe the value of experimental research

1.3.6: Compare advantages and disadvantages of developmental research

designs (cross-sectional, longitudinal, and sequential)

1.3.7: Describe challenges associated with conducting research in lifespan

development
How do we know what we know?

• Experiential reality: knowing based on your

own history
• Agreement reality: knowing based on what
others have told you or cultural ideas
• Problems with personal inquiry or drawing
conclusions based on our personal experience:
• The tendency to see what we believe because
of “cognitive blinders”
• Confirmation bias: the tendency to look for
evidence that we are right and in so doing, we
ignore contradictory evidence
Value of the Scientific Method

• Science involves continuously renewing our understanding of topics in question

and an ongoing investigation of how and why events occur

• Science is falsifiable

• Scientific inquiry involves attempts to reject or refute a theory or set of

assumptions

• A theory that cannot be falsified is not scientific

The Scientific Method: Sampling

• Science offers a more systematic way to make comparisons and guard against
bias
• Random sampling of research participants
• Techniques used to ensure that all participants have an equal chance of
being selected
• A randomly selected, representative sample is preferable, but it is not
always used because of costs and other limitations
• As a consumer of research, you should know how the sample was obtained and
keep this in mind when interpreting results
• It is possible that the results are limited to that sample or similar individuals and
not generalizable to everyone else
A Scientific Method for Quantitative Research

• Quantitative: quantifying or using statistics to understand phenomena

• Determine a research question
• Conduct a literature review of previous studies on the topic
• Determine a method of gathering information
• Conduct the study
• Interpret the results
• Draw conclusions; state limitations of the study and make suggestions for future
research
• Make your findings available to others
• To share information
• To have your work scrutinized by others
A Scientific Method for Qualitative Research

• Qualitative: theoretical ideas are “grounded” in experiences

• Begin with a broad area of interest
• Gain entrance into a group to be researched
• Gather field notes about the setting, the people, the structure, the activities or
other areas of interest
• Ask open-ended questions when interviewing participants
• Modify research questions as the study continues
• Note patterns or consistencies
• Explore new areas deemed important by the people being observed
• Report findings
Research Methods and Objectives

• Descriptive studies: objective to describe phenomena

• Main types: observation, case studies, surveys, and content analysis
• Correlational research: formally test whether a relationship exists between two
or more variables
• Experimental research: randomly assign people to different conditions, use
hypothesis testing to make inferences about how these conditions affect behavior
• Explanatory studies: designed to answer the question “why”
• Evaluation research: designed to assess the effectiveness of policies or
programs
Descriptive Research: Observational Studies

• Observational Studies (or naturalistic observation): involves watching and

recording the actions of participants
• Strength: the researcher can see how people behave rather than rely on self-
report
• Weaknesses:
• Do not allow the researcher to explain causal relationships
• Hawthorne effect: people tend to change their behavior when they know
they are being observed
Descriptive Research: Case Studies

• Case studies: explore a single case or situation in great detail

• Strength: helpful when investigating unusual situations about which little is

known

• Weakness: findings cannot be generalized or applied to larger populations; this

is because cases are not randomly selected and no control group is used for
comparison
Descriptive Research: Surveys

• Surveys: used to ask a standard set of questions

• Strengths: can yield surface information on a
variety of factors; useful in examining values,
attitudes, and opinions
• Weaknesses: may not allow for an in-depth
understanding of human behavior; self-report
may limit accuracy
• Validity: refers to accuracy of measurement
• Reliability: refers to consistency of measurement
Descriptive Research: Content Analysis

• Content analysis involves reviewing media such as old texts, pictures,

commercials, lyrics or other materials to explore patterns or themes in culture

• Secondary content analysis, or archival research, involves analyzing

information that has already been collected or examining documents or media to
uncover attitudes, practices or preferences
• Strength: do not have to recruit participants
• Weakness: limited to the questions asked and the quality of data originally
collected
Correlational Research
● Scatterplot: a plot of the relationship between two
scores; each dot represents a data point
● Positive correlation: the variables go up or down
together
● Negative correlation: the variables move in
opposite directions, indicated by a negative
number
● The r value of a strong correlation will have a high
absolute value
● If the absolute value is large, it is a strong
correlation
● A perfect correlation has an absolute value of 1.00
● Correlational does not equal causation
Experimental Research

• Experiments are designed to test hypotheses

• Hypotheses are specific statements about the relationships between variables
• A variable is anything that changes in value
• Variables are operationalized, which means the researcher specifies exactly
what is going to be measured
• Major advantage: the experimental method is the only research method that can
measure cause and effect relationships between variables
• Major disadvantage: the difficulty translating much of what concerns us about
human behavior into a laboratory setting
Basic Experimental Design

● Begin with a sample (or subset of a population) and randomly assign participants to
one of two groups:
○ Experimental group: exposed to an independent variable or condition (often a
treatment or intervention) the researcher introduces or manipulates as a potential
cause of an event or outcome (the dependent variable is the outcome of interest)
○ Control group: used for comparison, will not be exposed to the independent
variable
● After the experimental group is exposed to the independent variable, the two groups
are measured again to see if a change occurred
Practice Question 5

A correlational study on the relationship between hours of sleep and creativity would
allow researchers to _______.

A. determine if getting more sleep causes greater creativity

B. identify the relationship between two variables, sleep and creativity
C. watch and record the actions of sleepy but creative participants
D. explore the case of a sleep-deprived creative person in great detail
Research Design

• Research design: the strategy for deciding how to collect and analyze data

• Research design dictates which research methods are used and how

• Techniques aim to examine how age, cohort, gender, and social class impact
development
Cross-Sectional Research Design

● Used to examine behavior in participants

of different ages who are tested at the
same point in time
● Advantages: less time-consuming and
less expensive; provides information on
age differences
● Disadvantages: limited to one time of
measurement; cannot examine change
over time; cohort differences are
confounded with age differences
Longitudinal Research Design

● Begin with a group who may be of the same age and background (cohort), and
measure them repeatedly over a long period of time
● Advantage: can measure changes with age over time
● Disadvantages: expensive, takes a long time, and participants may drop out over
time; data are limited to only one cohort; possible practice effects; history effects
confounded with age changes
○ Attrition: participants fail to complete all portions of a study
○ Selective attrition: certain groups of participants may tend to drop out
Sequential Research Design

● Includes elements of both longitudinal and

cross-sectional research designs
● Advantages: examines changes within
individuals over time; examines changes
between participants of different ages at
the same point in time; examines cohort
effects; examines time in history effects
● Disadvantages: may be expensive and
take a long time; possible practice effects;
possible attrition
Challenges Conducting Developmental Research

• Ethical Concerns: Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) must review and approve all
research projects to ensure that the proposed research will be carried out ethically and
that the potential benefits of the research outweigh the risks and potential harm
• Informed consent: a contract stating that participants agree to engage in research
• Recruitment of research participants
• Samples of convenience may be easily recruited but not randomly sampled or
representative of the larger population
• Retention: problematic in longitudinal research and research with infants and young
children, who tend to have higher attrition rates than adults
• Design studies to be as short as possible and offer participants breaks
Class Discussion: Choose Your Research Design

1. Get into groups of three or four

2. Select a research topic from the following list (or create your own):
a. changes in parenting style over time, as children and parents grow older
b. the relationship between yoga practice and cortisol (stress hormone) levels
in the body
c. the amount of social media use among adolescents
3. Select one of three research designs: cross-sectional, longitudinal, or
sequential and describe how you would apply that research design
4. Identify the pros and cons of your chosen research design
5. Share your research design and its pros and cons with the class
Quick Review
How do we define physical, cognitive, and psychosocial development?
Is development continuous or discontinuous?
Does development follow one course or multiple courses?
What is the nature versus nurture debate?
What are the stages of human development?
What is the lifespan perspective of human development?
What is the value of the scientific method in researching development?
What are the methods and objectives of developmental research?
What is correlational research?
What is experimental research and how it is valuable?
What are the advantages and disadvantages of developmental research designs?
What are the challenges associated with conducting research in lifespan development?