PSYA01H3 Chapter Notes - Chapter 10: Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, Longitudinal Study, Teratology
Document Summary
We all have the same need as babies food, security, love, air, water, the latest gadget, exciting ways to spend our weekends, feeling smarter than the people around us. Developmental psychology: the study of human physical, cognitive, social, and behavioural characteristics across the lifespan. Cross sectional design: used to measure and compare samples of people at different ages at a given point in time. Longitudinal design: follows the development of the same set of individuals through time. Cross sectional designs are relatively cheap and easy to administer, and they allow a study to be done quickly. However, they can suffer from cohort effects: differences between people that result from being born in different time periods. A longitudinal study fixes the problem of cohort effects, but needs to follow a group of people of a long period of time, which can be very costly and time-consuming. Longitudinal designs suffer from attrition, when participants drop out of a study for some reason.
