Research Manual in Child Development

Book excerpt: This unique hands-on lab manual in child development provides great ideas and resources for teaching research courses involving child subjects. It includes projects in psychomotor/perceptual, cognitive, and social development. Projects are preceded by background essays on the history of that topic, related research, theoretical issues, and controversies. Each project has hypotheses to test, detailed procedures to follow, all stimuli, individual and group data sheets, empty tables, suggested statistics, discussion questions, and an updated bibliography. Special features of this second edition: *The introductory text portion details research considerations, including an introduction to psychological research, sections on developmental research, children as subjects, and general experimental research procedures. *The popular Infant Observation project has the student visit homes with babies for a semester and provides practice in observational data collection, reliability assessment, and report writing. *The cognitive development section includes two new subfields: Theory of Mind and Language--Children's Interpretation of the Word Big, in addition to classic studies of Piaget's spatial perspective-taking and attention and memory. The final chapter describes a suggested neuropsychological project. *The socialized child section includes a new study on sibling relationships as seen by the older or younger sibling, in addition to the earlier projects on self-esteem, sex identity, and cooperation-competition. The final section describes a suggested cross-cultural interview project.