Child Development Theories and Examples

Implications For Research

Although the collaboration approach has not yet been fully articulated, it already seems to have straightforward implications for research practice. If child and environment are always collaborating to produce a behavior, explanations of that behavior must invoke characteristics of both. As a practical procedure to encourage such explanations, investigators can use research designs that vary important characteristics of both the child and the environment. With such designs, variations in both child and environment are likely to affect behavior (Fischer et al., in press; Hand, 1981).
A series of studies on the development of understanding social categories illustrates how this type of research design can lead to analyses of the collaboration between child and environment in cognitive development (Hand, 1982; Van Parys, 1983; Watson and Fischer, 1977, 1980). The studies were designed to test several predicted sequences for the development of social categories such as the social roles of doctor and patient and the social-interaction categories of ''nice'' and "mean." Each study was designed to include variations in both the child and the environment.
The main variable involving child characteristics was age. A wide age range was included in each study to ensure substantial variation in children's capacities to understand the social categories. Ages ranged from 1 to 12 and thus included the relevant periods for the major developmental reorganizations in preadolescent school-age children.
To determine the contribution of environmental characteristics, behavior was assessed under three different conditions, which were designed to provide varying degrees of support for advanced performance. In a structured condition—the elicited-imitation assessment—a separate task was administered to test each predicted step in the developmental sequence. The subject was shown a story embodying the skill required for that step and was asked to act out the story. Thus this condition provided high environmental support for performance at every step. The other two conditions provided less support and thus assessed more spontaneous behavior. In the free-play condition, each child played alone with the toys, acting out his or her own stories. In the best-story condition the experimenter returned to the testing room and asked the child to make up the best story he or she could.
The results showed a systematic effect of environmental support on the child's performance, but the effect varied as a function of the developmental level of the child's best performance. For the first several steps in the developmental sequence, virtually all children showed the same highest step in all three conditions. However, a major change occurred beginning with the first step testing the developmental level of simple relations of representations (which typically emerges at approximately age 4). At this step most children performed at a higher step in the structured assessment than in the two more spontaneous conditions, and that gap grew systematically in the later steps in the sequence. Figure 3-3 shows these results for the studies of the social roles of doctor and patient, and parallel results were obtained in studies of the social interaction categories of nice and mean (Hand, 1982) and the self-related categories of gender and age (Van Parys, 1983).