Description
PSY 210
Name: _____________________________
Assignment 1 ? Research and Theories
Instructions: This assignment consists of selected topic(s) of interest from Chapter 1. This is a
three-part assignment: Part I, Part II, and Part III. Please complete each one carefully and
completely.
PART I
True or False: Mid-Twentieth-Century Theories and Recent Theoretical Perspectives
Directions: Read each of the following statements and indicate whether it is True (T) or False (F).
_____ 1. According to Freud, in each stage of psychosexual development, parents walk a
fine line between permitting too much or too little gratification of their child?s
basic needs.
_____ 2. Both Freud and Erikson pointed out that normal development must be understood
in relation to each culture?s life situation.
_____ 3. Behaviorism has been praised for acknowledging people?s contributions to their
own development.
_____ 4. In Piaget?s theory, as the brain develops and children?s experiences expand, they
move through four broad stages, each characterized by qualitatively distinct ways
of thinking.
_____ 5. Research indicates that Piaget underestimated the competencies of infants and
preschoolers.
_____ 6. Information-processing researchers view the mind as a symbol-manipulating
system through which information flows.
_____ 7. Developmental neuroscience can identify relationships between changes in the
brain and cognitive processing, but it has little to say about social or emotional
development.
_____ 8. According to Vygotsky, social interaction is necessary for children to acquire the
ways of thinking and behaving that make up a community?s culture.
_____ 9. The mesosystem consists of social settings that do not contain the developing
person but nevertheless affect experiences in immediate settings.
_____ 10. In Bronfenbrenner?s theory, people are both products and producers of their
environments.
PART II
Research Methods and Designs: Choosing the Best Approach (pp. 21?25, 27?30)
Read the following three scenarios and answer the corresponding questions:
(a) An investigator is interested in studying whether infant child care leads to an insecure
attachment bond between children and their mothers during the first year of life as
well as into the preschool years.
(1) What research method and design would you choose for this study? Why?
(2) Would the results tell you anything about cause and effect? Why or why not?
(3) Would this study involve any special ethical considerations? If so, what are they?
(b) An investigator is interested in studying whether a new drug is as effective as diet and
exercise in lowering cholesterol levels in an adult sample.
(1) What research method and design would you choose for this study? Why?
(2) Would the results tell you anything about cause and effect? Why or why not?
(3) Would this study involve any special ethical considerations? If so, what are they?
(c) An investigator is interested in determining whether sociability in children is related
to school achievement and whether this relationship, if any, varies for children in
preschool, elementary school, and middle school.
(1) What research method and design would you choose for this study? Why?
(2) Would the results tell you anything about cause and effect? Why or why not?
(3) Would this study involve any special ethical considerations? If so, what are they?
PART III
Research Designs: Comparing Cross-Sectional, Longitudinal, and Sequential Designs
Directions: Each of the following statements pertains to cross-sectional, longitudinal, or
sequential research designs. For each statement, determine which research design it describes.
1. The researcher studies groups of participants who differ in age at the same point in time.
Research design:
2. The researcher is interested in whether frequent exposure to violent television
programming in early childhood predicts aggressive and antisocial behavior in adulthood.
Research design:
3. The researcher wants to investigate psychological well-being in middle adulthood for
groups of participants born a decade apart.
Research design:
4. Age-related changes may be distorted because of participant dropout, practice effects,
and cohort effects.
Research design:
5. The researcher follows a sequence of samples (two or more age groups), collecting data
on them at the same points in time.
Research design:
6. This design does not permit the study of individual developmental trends. Age
differences may be distorted because of cohort effects.
Research design:
7. To investigate age-related changes in adults? problem-solving skills, the researcher
selects three samples?adults in their thirties, adults in their fifties, and adults in their
seventies?and tracks each group for five years.
Research design:
8. To investigate how children of different ages process traumatic events, such as school
violence, the researcher recruits children who are in grades 6, 9, and 12 in the 2016?2017
school year and interviews them about their responses to the Boston Marathon bombing
in 2013.
Research design:
9. The researcher studies the same group of participants repeatedly at different ages.
Research design:
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