Een volledige, bondige samenvatting van het boek "human development". Dit boek is tentamenstof voor het vak ontwikkelingspsychologie aan de universiteit Utrecht. Zelf heb ik een 8,6 gehaald met behulp van deze samenvatting!
Human development
Unit 1: Meta-theories, what is development?
-> scientific study of the ways in which people change, as well as remain the same, from conception to
death.
Lifespan perspective:
Underlying principles of the lifespan perspective: Development is
1. lifelong
2. Multidirectional and multidimensional
3. Includes gains and losses
4. Characterized by plasticity
5. Embedded in historical/cultural context
6. Multiply determined (nature and nurture)
7. Multidisciplinary
Developmental systems of influence:
1. Normative age-graded influences: Social experiences/ biological changes
2. Normative history graded-influence: Time period in which you were born shapes experience.
-Cohort: People who are born at roughly the same period in a particular society.
3. Non-normative influences: Specific influences that aren’t organized by age/historical time
Domains of development:
1. Physical: Changes in height/weight/sensory capabilities/nervous system/disease
2. Cognitive: Change in intelligence/language etc.
3. Psychosocial: Change in emotion/self-perception/interpersonal relationships
Contextual perspective on development: Development depends on : 1. Socioeconomic status (SES),
2. Poverty level, 3. Culture: cultural relativity= appreciation for cultural differences and the
understanding that cultural practices are best understood from the stand point of that culture.
Life span: maximum age life expectancy: average
Conceptions of age:
-chronological: year-birth year
-biological: how quickly the body is aging
-psychological: psychological adaptive capacity compared to others of the same age
-social: based on social norms of out culture and expectations for our age
Age periods of development:
1. Prenatal: conception-birth
2. Infancy and toddlerhood: birth-2y/o
3. Early childhood: 2y/o-6y/o
4. Middle+late childhood: 6y/o-onset puberty
5. Adolescence: onset puberty-18y/o
6. Emerging adulthood: 18y/o-25y/o
7. Early adulthood: 25y/o-30y/o
8. Middle adulthood: 30y/o/-65y/o
9. Late adulthood: 65+
Meta-theories of human development:
Meta-theories have assumptions about:
1. Human nature: good/bad or clean slate
2. Causes of development: nature vs nurture
3. Role of individual: passive vs active
4. Stability vs change
5. Continuity vs discontinuity
,6. Universality vs context specifity
Theories and their metaphors:
1. Maturation theory: Humans are seeds: genetic make-up of a person, environment can’t change
somebodies nature.
2. Mechanistic theory: Humans are machines: people are passive, development is continuous and
environment decides everything
3. Organismic theory: humans are butterflies: development is discontinuous, environment aids
development, which is progressive and goes one way.
4. Contextual theory: Humans are a tennis game: development is based on activity between person
and environment.
historical theories about development:
1. Preformationism: children are small adults
2. John Locke: Tabula rasa, a child’s mind is a blank slate and they are formed by the environment
3. Jean-Jacques Roussea: development happens according to a natural plan.
4. Arnold Gesell: maturation happens in a fixed sequence
5. Freud: childhood makes us social beings.
Contemporary theories about development:
1. Psychosocial theory: there are 8 developmental stages, fostered by social relationships.
2. Behaviorism: only what can be observed
3. Social learning theory: Reciprocal determines: interplay between out personality and the way we
interpret events/how they influence us.
4. Cognitive theory: how our mental processes change over time
5. Ecological system theory: framework of influences on human development, micro-, meso-, exo-,
macro-, and chronosystem.
Unit 2: Research methods:
§2.1: How do we learn to promote development?:
Developmental practices: All the decisions/actions we take in our professional/personal lives that
shape our own/other’s development.
Science: Professional experience instead of personal experience-> limitations: implicit biases.
“best” practices for promoting development: lessons gained from scientific evidence and expert
practioners.
Strengths of science:
1. It’s a public enterprise
2. It’s inherently open
3. It critiques and reinvents itself
Shortcomings:
1.exclusion/distortion
2. People assume it has a monopoly on knowledge
3. Distortion of study of minority groups
4. Theories are based on underlying assumptions
§2.2: lifespan developmental research methodologies:
Types of methodologies:
1. Deductive: hypotheses-> observations, starts with theory
2. Inductive: starts with general question based on observations-> theory
3. Collaborative: collaboration between researchers and community.
Methods of gathering information (and their disadvantages)
1. Observations:
-Naturalistic: reactivity/ a lot of factors
-Lab: not able to generalize as well
-Video/audio: not complete
, -Local experts: biases
2. Self-reports: socially desirable
-Surveys: only surface info
-Interviews: reactivity
-Open-ended interviews: less comparable
-Focus groups
-Respond to a prompt
3. Psychological tests and assessments
4. Laboratory tasks
5. Psychophysiological assessment
6. Archival data/artifacts
7. Case study
§2.3: descriptive and explanatory designs:
Goals of lifespan development science:
Target=1.Normative change/stability and 2. Differential change and stability.
Goals: 1.Description: portraying patterns of development. Answer to “what”, ”how”, “when”-
questions.
2.Optimization: explicit accounts of the factors that cause/influence/produce the patterns of change
and stability that have been described. Answers “why”-questions.
Designs:
1.Descriptive developmental designs: when-question, cross-sectional, longitudinal and sequential.
2. Explanatory: how/where question: experimental/nature (lab vs field)
Describing development: Cross-sectional, longitudinal and sequential design:
1. Cross-sectional: collects information at one point in time of groups of people who differ in age.
Advantage: Information about wide range of ages in a short period of time and about differences in
groups.
Disadvantage: no information about change, because differences between groups van be due to
generational differences-> cohort effects: lifelong effects of belonging to a certain generation.
2. Longitudinal: examines one group repeatedly over multiple points in time.
Advantage: information about change/development/differences in pathways and may show if
experiences predict a certain outcome
Disadvantage: The changes in people could also be because of historical changes
3. Sequential: looking at age and historical changes for multiple cohorts-> cross-sequential design:
cross-sectional study combined with a longitudinal study.
Advantage: able to compare longitudinal changes across different cohorts
Disadvantage: complex
Explaining development: Experimental and naturalistic designs
Experimental designs: researcher decides the causal agent and who’ll get it.
1. Laboratory experiment: advantage for detecting causality
2. Naturalistic laboratory: in a lab, but no deciding the casual factor.
-> used for phenomena that can only be measured in a lab.
Advantage: control and precision
Disadvantage:-different context than real life-> alternation/distortion of the phenomena
-anything in the lab can be a cause
-time span of causal effects can’t be simulated
3. Field experiments: Advantage: it has the same advantages as a lab, but without the disadvantages
of the context
Disadvantage: -administration of causal factors is a little messy
-people can drop out
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