PSYCH 1X03 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: Chromosome, Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, Synaptic Pruning
9 Jan 2014
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Document Summary
The reason you will find so much research focused on childhood is that so many enormous and fundamental changes are concentrated in this period of our lives. However, developmental psychologists are concerned with the entire lifespan of human beings. It is difficult to design an experiment i which all the potentially relevant extraneous variables have been controlled for. It is also important to remember that numerous other developmental processes are taking place at the same time. Even if we show through experimentation that some variable can influence development, it does not necessarily mean that it actually does influence normal development in the real world . In fact, developmental change in a system may be the product of the simultaneous action of a large number of variables. However when we use the quasi-experiment, we are not randomly assigning subjects to conditions and therefore cannot make the same kind of cause-and-effect interpretations of our data.
