The oops where have I been query.

I'm glad we are into 2006. The end of 2005 was too busy for me...getting ready to teach again and having a friend in town - which meant skiing and a short vacation to the Olympic Peninsula :).

But my resolution is to do my blogs regularly - starting today.

Studying Children

How do we study children? I have been known to say that there are two professions that are difficult - being a veterinarian or a pediatrician - both require working with organisms that can not always communicate clearly what feels "wrong."

Studying children sort of fits in here too but I have been a researcher - with newborns, infants and 5 year olds. The main difference is that researchers are working with populations that need not communicate what is "wrong" and we just need to find ways to measure what communication IS there.

Research comes in many forms - studying individuals or groups, short term or long term studies, and combinations of the forms.

How do we know what changes occur say from year 1 to year 2? We can study the same child for the year or we can look today at a 1-year-old and also look at a 2-year-old and measure the differences. Studying the same person over time is called longitudinal research. Studying the two different children is called cross-sectional research. Both are valid types of research.

Much of what we learned about development in the past came from longitudinal studies, mainly at universities, and which were funded for decades. Going back to the last post, can you see how the investigator can have a biased approach? Not to say they did or that the research was flawed, but when you study the same people over time you, as the investigator, are now part of that person's life and being the one studied is part of the persona of the people in the study.

Cross-sectional research is less affected by long term biases but the draw back here is that the researcher is studying two different children with all that entails. Getting two different yet "matching" groups of individuals is done statistically. Factors are matched as best they can be- such as family make-up, education levels of parents, type of neighborhoods lived in, etc.

All research has flaws and all researchers have flaws - we are all human. But the knowledge we have gained over the decades from all kinds of research and researchers has led to an understanding of child development.

Another caveat - gains in technology have led to gains in the study of humans. For example, when I was in college, child development was a relatively small field of research and there were few text books on the subject! When I was in graduate school, researchers were finding ways of studying infants; some were looking at perception and language development and very few were interested in fathers! Now infancy, fathers, prenatal, early postnatal, and language and perception are major fields of study.

Just imagine what we will know in the future.