A Word About Theory
The following information is taken from Patricia Miller's classic book
Miller, P.H. (1993). Theories of Developmental Psychology. NY: Freeman
As you read the chapters in Bornstein and Lamb, look for the major theories that the reported research affirms or qualifies. Ask yourself how those theories go about answering these four questions:
What is the basic nature of the human?
Is development qualitative or quantitative?
How do nature and nurture contribute to development?
What is it that develops?
What is the basic nature of human beings?
There are three primary views. One is mechanistic in which the world operates in a machine like fashion. Development is primarily passive with the child being acted upon by the events in his or her environment. This view is related to Locke's empiricist philosophy (remember the tabula rasa). These theories usually emphasize continuity in development.
The second view is organismic in which the organism is viewed as active and self-regulating by nature. No process can be considered well in isolation as the whole of the organism is involved; for example, hearing cannot be explained only by the acoustic system, but related cognitive and affective processes need to be considered as well. The active organism engages in self initiated behavior to give influence its experiences rather than just receive them and be shaped by them passively. These theories are usually stage theories.
The third view contextualism holds that experience and development have meaning only when the larger social, political, historical, cultural context is taken into account. It is also a wholistic view and one that views the individual in context as more than the sum of its parts.
Is development qualitative or quantitative?
Qualitative changes are stage like and involve changes of type or kind (e.g., tadpole --> frog) so that the new phenomena do not reduce to the old type. Changes are in structure and organization. Piaget, for example, claims that cognition changes in qualitative ways over the course of development because children think in fundamentally different ways as they mature rather than simply acquiring more and more knowledge.
Quantitative changes are changes in amount or intensity, but not in kind (a small frog to a big frog). Vocabulary increases quantitatively over development as children learn more and more words.
These two types of orderly change are not mutually exclusive.
How do nature and nurture contribute to development?
The debate over which was the driving force behind children's development, nature or nurture, is an age old one in psychology. In the 1600's philosopher Descartes claimed that certain ideas were innate while Locke suggested that the child came into the world as a blank slate waiting for experience to leave write its history.
We now appreciate that no gene has ever been expressed in the absence of an environment. Hence the critical questions in development are not whether it is nature or nurture but to what extent each is necessary and how they might work together to yield developmental outcomes.
What tends to differentiate theories from each other is the relative power awarded experience and biology. Still others emphasize the inextricable link of the two, such as Wachs and Gandour in their "organismic specificity" hypothesis that suggests that environmental effects will best be understood by the important sources of individual differences that characterize the people experiencing them. For example, one type of parenting might have two very different outcomes depending on whether the child experiencing that parenting style is particularly introverted and timid or extraverted and bold.
Miller cites Wohlwill (1973) as describing at least four ways in which nature and nurture might interact:
The "hospital bed" model in which the person is passively experiencing environmental events as if in a hospital bed.
The "amusement park" model in which the person has choice and is capable of making decisions about the experiences in which he or she will engage; however, once done, there is little effort he or she can exert (once on the roller coaster, there's little you can do but go for the ride).
The "swim meet" model in which the person is the central and active figure in development and the environment is simply the supportive context required (as the sound of the gun to the swimmers who then take off in the pool).
The "tennis match" model in which there is a continual interplay and tension between environment and biology. Not only does one player return the ball, he or she influences the way in which the other player will send it back.
What is it that develops?
Theories describe the development of phenomena that the theorist sees as the central feature of the process--schemas, strategies of information processing, id/ego/superego, attachment to name a few. What is seen as central to development depends on:
The level of analysis from molecular biology to molar behaviors.
Whether the focus is on structure (e.g., thought or personality) or process (functioning aspects of the system).
The content emphasized (e.g., thought vs. personality).
Whether overt behavior or covert processes are of interest.
The methods used.
It is not always clear what comes first--do you choose a method because a phenomenon is of interest or does the phenomenon become interesting once there is a way to study it?