What is development?

Development is the field of study to understand constancy and change throughout the lifespan.
Some theorists see development as a smooth, continuous process where children gradually build on
existing skills; while others view it as occurring in discontinuous stages, with rapid shifts followed by
stability, each stage bringing qualitatively new ways of understanding and responding to the world.

Various psychologists gave the definition of development, which is as follows:

Jean Piaget defined it as a qualitative change in how children think, progressing through our
visiting stages from both adulthoods.

Development is socially mediated process, where learning and cultural tools play a central role.
(Lev Vygotsky)

There are three domains of development via: physical, cognitive, social and emotional. Each domain
influences and is influenced by the others.

Child development

Child development is an area of study devoted to understanding constancy and change from
conception through adolescence. Research on child development did not begin until the late nineteenth
and early 20th century.

It is so dramatic that researchers divided into three periods which are infancy, toddlerhood, early
childhood, middle childhood, adolescence, and emerging adulthood. Within the field of child
development many theories offer very different ideas about what children are likely and how they change.

Perspectives in child development

In Chapter 1 of Laura E. Berk’s Child Development (8th Edition), the main perspectives in child
development include:

1. The Psychoanalytic Perspective – Focuses on how children move through stages in which they
confront conflicts between biological drives and social expectations.
2. The Behaviorist and Social Learning Perspectives – Emphasize directly observable events
(stimuli and responses) and how modeling, imitation, and reinforcement shape behavior.
3. The Cognitive-Developmental Perspective (Piaget) – Views children as actively constructing
knowledge as they manipulate and explore their world, progressing through distinct stages.
 4. The Information-Processing Perspective – Compares the mind to a computer, focusing on how
information is encoded, stored, and used.
5. Ethology and Evolutionary Developmental Psychology – Examine adaptive value of behavior
and its evolutionary history (e.g., imprinting, critical periods).
6. Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory – Emphasizes the role of culture and social interaction in
development of thinking and behavior.
7. Ecological Systems Theory (Bronfenbrenner) – Views the child as developing within a
complex system of relationships (microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem,
chronosystem).
8. Dynamic Systems Perspective – Proposes that the child’s mind, body, and physical/social
worlds form an integrated system that reorganizes as new skills emerge.

Research design

In deciding on a research design, investigators choose a way of setting up a study that permits
them to test their hypotheses with the greatest certainty possible. Two main types of designs are used in
all research on human behavior: correlational and experimental.

Correlational research design

In a correlational design, researchers gather information on individuals, generally in natural life

circumstances, and make no effort to alter their experiences. Then they look at relationships between
participants’ characteristics and their behavior or development. Suppose we want to answer such
questions as, Do parents’ styles of interacting with their child. The correlational design offers a way of
examining relationships between variables. But correlational studies have one major limitation: We
cannot infer cause and effect. In correlational studies and in other types of research designs, investigators
often examine relationships between variables by using a correlation coefficient— a number that
describes how two measures, Or variables, are associated with each other.
Experimental research design

Experimental research design

Research methods

Research methods are the systematic ways used to study and understand behavior and
development. In child development, these methods help researchers explore how children think, feel, and
grow across different stages. They provide structured approaches to collect data—through observation,
interviews, experiments, or case studies—so that findings are reliable and meaningful. The brief
explanation of them is given below.

Systematic observation

Observations of the behavior of children, and of the adults who are important in their lives can be
made in different ways. One approach is to go into the field, or natural environment, and record the
behavior of interest-a method called naturalistic observation. In this, the researcher goes into the field and
records the behavior of interest. A limitation of this method is that some children have more opportunities
than others to display certain behaviors in everyday life.

In structured observation the investigator sets up a laboratory situation that evokes the behavior
of interest so that every participant has an equal opportunity to display the response. Structured
observation permits greater control over the research situation than does naturalistic observation. In
addition, the method is especially useful for studying behaviors— such as parent-child or friendship
interactions—that investigators rarely have an opportunity to see in everyday life. For example, to
compare friendship quality of aggressive and nonaggressive children, researchers had nearly one hundred
10-year-old boys come to a laboratory, each accompanied by best friend.

Self report measures

In child development research, self-report methods like clinical interviews and structured
interviews/questionnaires are widely used to understand children’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

Clinical Interview is a flexible method where the researcher tailors questions to gain a detailed
account of a child’s thinking. It helps capture children’s reasoning in their everyday terms and provides
rich, in-depth information in a short time. However, it may lead to inaccurate reporting since children
might misremember, exaggerate, or try to please the interviewer. Its flexibility also makes it hard to
compare responses across children.

Whereas on the other hand in Structured Interviews, Questionnaires, and Test each child answers
the same set of questions in the same way. This makes it easier to compare responses, collect data
efficiently, and cover areas children may not think of on their own. However, this approach lacks the
depth of clinical interviews and still depends on accurate self-reporting, which may not always reflect
reality.
 Together, these methods show the balance between depth (clinical interviews) and efficiency and
comparability (structured interviews/questionnaires) in studying child development. Researchers often
use both to gain a fuller and more reliable understanding of children’s growth.

Figure 1

Source:

Clinical, or Case Study, Method

 The clinical, or case study, method combines interviews, observations, and testing to create an in-
depth picture of a child’s psychological functioning. It is especially useful for studying unique cases, such
as prodigies—for example, Adam, who mastered languages, music, and math early with the help of
supportive parents. While this method offers rich insights, it can be subjective, biased, and difficult to
generalize, so findings should be confirmed with other research methods.

Language development

Language is the most awesome thing of human achievements—it develops with extraordinary
speed in childhood. B.F. Skinner and linguist Noam Chomsky inspired a burst of research on language
development.

Language development refers to the process of acquiring the complex system of sounds,
meanings, and rules of language. It involves mastering the sound system (phonology), meanings
(semantics), rules for word and sentence formation (grammar), and rules for communication in context
(pragmatics).

During the first half of the twentieth century, research on language development identified
milestones that applied to children around the globe , language seemed to be learned, not innate. Without
exposure to language, children born deaf or severely neglected did not acquire verbal communication.
This apparent contradiction set the stage for an intense nature—nurture debate.

There are various theories under language development:

The behaviorist perspective

B. F. Skinner (1957) proposed that children learn language through operant conditioning—
parents reinforce sounds resembling words and children also learn through imitation. While reinforcement
and imitation play some role, this view is limited: adults cannot tutor children intensively enough, and
children often create novel utterances that they have neither heard nor been reinforced for. Instead of
memorizing sentences, children acquire an understanding of language rules, though adult interaction still
supports their learning.

The naivest perspective

Linguist Noam Chomsky (1957) proposed a nativist account that regards language as a uniquely
human accomplishment, etched into the structure of the brain. He was the first to convince the scientific
community that—in contrast to the behaviorist view—children assume much responsibility for their own
language learning.
 He argued that language is too complex to be learned only through teaching or imitation. He
proposed an innate Language Acquisition Device (LAD), which contains a universal grammar—basic
rules common to all languages. This allows children to quickly and naturally grasp grammar, create new
sentences, and understand meaning with minimal exposure, making parental training largely unnecessary.

The Interactionist Perspective

In recent years, new theories of language development have arisen, replacing the dichotomy of
the Skinner-Chomsky debate with an emphasis on interactions between inner predispositions and
environmental influences. One type of interactionist theory applies the information-processing
perspective to language development; a second type emphasizes social interaction.

Emotional development

Emotion is a rapid appraisal of the personal significance of a situation that prepares us for action.
Functionalist theorists believe that emotions are central in all our endeavors, cognitive processing, social
behavior, and even physical health. Emotions such as happiness, interest, surprise, fear, anger, sadness,
and disgust are universal in humans and other primates, have a long evolutionary history of promoting
survival, and can be directly inferred from spatial expressions.

Emotional development, formally overshadowed by cognition, is an exciting, rapidly expanding

area of research. It supports cognition relationships and mental health. In this, children learn to express,
understand, and manage emotions as they grow. As children develop, they gradually learn emotional self-
regulation, moving from relying on caregivers to using language and coping statergies.

Bark (2021) explains that emotional development begins in infancy with basic emotions like
happiness, anger, and fear, as infants express smiles and laughter in the first year, strengthening their
bond with caregivers. The social smile typically emerges around 6-8 weeks, followed by stranger anxiety
at 6-12 months, and later self-awareness develops around 18-24 months.

Temperament or biologically base difference in emotional reactivity and self control plays an
important role in shaping emotional style.

Ethics of research on children