Child Development From Infancy to Adolescence. Laura E. Levine
of them and are talking to each other. They sit at a large window. On the other side of the window, a classroom with two sets of children and an adult with each set are seated at two tables."/>
Scientific observation. Carefully conducted observations, either in natural settings or in a laboratory, can give us insight into behavior as it naturally occurs.
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Also, the mere presence of an observer might change the way people behave. Children usually adapt to the presence of an observer without too much difficulty, but video recorders can be used so that the child does not see the observer. A limitation of naturalistic observational research is that it doesn’t tell us directly about the causes of behavior. To examine causes of behavior, researchers must be able to control the conditions of the children they are studying. You will learn more about what allows a researcher to conclude that one variable is the cause of certain outcomes when you read about research designs later in this chapter.
Self-Report Measures
Another way to gather information relatively quickly and efficiently is to use self-report measures such as surveys, questionnaires, and interviews. However, the usefulness of the data from self-report measures largely depends on the accuracy and validity of the responses received, so having questions that are precise, well written, and understandable is essential.
Survey: A data collection technique that asks respondents to answer a predetermined set of questions.
Questionnaire: A written form of a survey.
Interview: A data collection technique in which an interviewer poses questions to a respondent.
One problem with self-report measure is that the person answering the questions may be unwilling or unable to give complete or accurate responses. And sometimes respondents give the answer they think the researcher is looking for, or one they think makes them look good in the researcher’s eyes, a problem called social desirability. You can see how social desirability becomes a challenge for researchers investigating sensitive topics such as sexuality, drugs, or prejudice. The Journey of Research: Children’s Eyewitness Testimony illustrates the powerful influence the wording of questions can have on the data we obtain.
Social desirability: The tendency of respondents to answer questions in a way to please the researcher or to make them look good in the researcher’s eyes.
Journey of Research: Children’s Eyewitness Testimony
A revealing illustration of the impact of how we ask a question on the answer we get comes from research on children’s eyewitness testimony. In the 1990s, there were several high-profile cases of alleged child abuse. Under relentless and often suggestive questioning, children described horrific abuse at the hands of adults who were caring for them. Based on this testimony, a number of defendants initially received jail sentences, but in all these cases the charges were later dismissed or the plaintiffs were released from prison because of the improper way evidence had been gathered.
In the notorious McMartin Preschool case, seven teachers were accused of sexually abusing several hundred young children based on interviews such as this one:
Interviewer: Can you remember the naked pictures?
Child: (Shakes head “no”)
Interviewer: Can’t remember that part?
Child: (Shakes head “no”)
Interviewer: Why don’t you think about that for a while, okay? Your memory might come back to you.
We now know that even young children are able to accurately recall events and can give reliable eyewitness testimony (Odegard & Toglia, 2013), but when questions are misleading, the children are subjected to repeated questioning, or the interviewer makes overt suggestions about what has happened, we cannot trust children’s answers (Krähenbühl & Blades, 2006). It is clear from the way the interviewer in the McMartin case kept repeating the question and refused to accept the child’s denial that there had been naked pictures that this interviewer had a particular answer in mind and wanted the child to give that answer. The questioning is not at all unbiased. Suggesting that a memory “might come back” implies that the event is something that happened but has been forgotten rather than allowing the possibility that it never happened at all. Because children are limited in their ability to understand and interpret language, we need to be particularly careful about the wording of questions when designing surveys, questionnaires, and interviews for them. In Chapter 11 you will read about best practices for conducting a forensic interview of possible victims of child abuse (Newlin et al., 2015). Using these techniques, the interviewer can help the child talk about his or her experiences without inadvertently suggesting answers to the interviewer’s questions.
Source: Interview Number 111, p. 29 as cited in Garven, Wood, Malpass, & Shaw (1998, p. 349).
Usually interviewers ask everyone in the sample the same set of questions, but sometimes they want to ask additional follow-up questions or ask the respondent to expand on the original answers or provide examples. In this case, researchers can use a clinical interview, which allows this greater flexibility. Much of Piaget’s research was based on clinical interviews.
Clinical interview: An interview strategy in which the interviewer can deviate from a standard set of questions to gather additional information.
Because infants and children may be too young to respond to an interviewer’s questions, we may need to rely on information provided by a second party, such as parents, childcare providers, and teachers. The more time these people have spent with the child and the more familiar they are with the child’s behavior, the more likely they will be able to provide high-quality information. Parent reports have been used to describe the challenges faced by their children with cerebral palsy (Forsman & Eliasson, 2016), and teacher reports of bullying of overweight children in the school environment (Jansen et al., 2014).
Standardized Tests
You are probably familiar with standardized tests such as IQ tests and achievement tests. We standardize a test by administering it to large groups of children to establish norms. A norm is the average or typical performance of a child of a given age on the test. Once we have established the norms for a test, we can compare an individual child’s performance to the appropriate age norms to determine whether that child is performing at, above, or below the level of the average child of the same age. Standardized tests are also useful for assessing the effectiveness of programs and interventions. For example, the effectiveness of a prekindergarten program that provided a coaching system for literacy, language, and math skills was assessed using standardized tests of vocabulary, prereading skills, and early math skills (Weiland & Yoshikawa, 2013).
Standardized test: A test that is administered and scored in a standard or consistent way to all examinees.
Norm: Something that is average or typical such as the performance of an individual of a given age on a test.
Some standardized testing has been controversial because of concerns about the validity of these tests, that is, whether they actually measure what they say they are measuring. For example, critics have claimed that college entrance tests such as the SAT and the ACT are biased in a way that discriminates against certain groups of students. On average, men score higher than women on these tests; Asians/Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders and Whites score higher than Mexican Americans/Latinos or African Americans; and students from families with higher incomes score higher than students from families with lower incomes (FairTest, 2016). In response to concerns about possible bias, over 900 colleges have stopped using the SAT or ACT in admission decisions or have made them optional (FairTest, 2017). The American Psychological Association