Chapter 2

What is ‘child psychology’?

Nathalia Gjersoe
 Chapter 2 What is ‘child psychology’?

Chapter 2 What is ‘child psychology’?

This chapter turns to child psychology, introducing you to this
perspective on children and childhoods through the following issues:
What is child psychology? Child psychology describes and explains
children’s development from birth to adolescence and the transition to
adulthood. This perspective on children and childhoods is interested in
how children think, feel and behave, and is often divided into
specialised areas that consider physical, cognitive (thinking), social and
emotional development.
Key child development theories. Theories in child psychology aim to
describe, explain and predict children and young people’s development.
In this chapter you will explore some theories of children’s thinking,
learning and behaviour.
Key child development questions. Does development happen
smoothly and slowly over time? Or does it ‘jump’ from one stage of
ability to the next? What role does the social and cultural environment
play in how children develop, and how much do children themselves
actively affect their own development? These are some of the
questions the chapter explores.
How psychologists find things out. Research in psychology uses a
scientific approach to studying children’s thoughts, feelings and
behaviours. It takes a sceptical stance and applies a systematic
approach. It uses methods such as observations, interviews and
experiments. Special methods have been developed to study infant
behaviour and processes of change. In this chapter you will learn about
some of these methods.

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Learning outcomes
When you have studied this chapter, you should be able to:

. discuss the main definitions of child psychology as an area of

study
. discuss the cognitive, social and emotional aspects associated
with children’s development
. compare dominant theories within the context of children’s
cognitive development
. discuss a range of issues that influence children’s early
development
. outline some of the methodological considerations involved in
carrying out research with infants and children.

Introduction
Chapter 1 has introduced the idea that childhood is a universal
experience and that we can all relate to our own childhoods and those
of others. The universal experiences of children are also the subject of
child psychology; however, within this approach the focus is on
individual children and how their development changes over time. By
focusing on the individual child, psychologists can assess changes in
the child’s abilities, which include their physical, cognitive, social and
emotional development. There is also an emphasis on describing how
development is shaped through internal and external influences.
Originally, child psychologists were primarily interested in the
acquisition of skills throughout infancy and early childhood, but there
has been a more recent appreciation of how this range of skills
develops throughout later childhood and into adolescence.
In this chapter, we will begin by defining the term ‘child psychology’
and considering the importance of using milestones to chart children’s
development. We will then examine some of the different dimensions,
with a focus on the maturation of its physical, cognitive, social and
emotional aspects, and how these are emphasised in some of the key
theories around children’s cognitive development. In the later sections
of the chapter, you will look at the types of questions that
psychologists seek to address when considering a child’s development,

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and you will be introduced to a range of experimental and scientific

approaches that are often used to explore children’s development
throughout the childhood years.

What is child psychology?

Very often psychologists observe infants’ and children’s behaviour, and
compare these against developmental milestones. Think of two
children, around the ages of 3 and 7 years. Think about how different
these children may be in terms of how they speak, their social interests
and how they respond to social situations. Is the 3-year-old, for
example, more prone to tantrums than the older child? Is the 7-year-
old more obedient or articulate than the younger child? Now think
about how the 7-year-old compares to a teenager or adult. Are there
differences in the way that they think and speak and behave? Child
psychology is interested in describing how people change as they grow
up from birth to adolescence. Child psychology is also interested in
explaining how these changes occur: are 3-year-olds, 7-year-olds and
teenagers different simply because of their experiences of the world,
because of biological changes that happen over time, or some
combination of the two?
‘Child psychology’ is an umbrella term that covers all aspects of
psychology relating to children and young people, from before they are
born up until around 18 years of age. More than any other time of
post-natal life, childhood and adolescence are characterised by a great
deal of change. Some of these changes are obvious, such as changes in
height, language ability and physical dexterity. Others are less obvious,
such as how children’s senses take in information from the world and
process it. Child psychologists attempt to make sense of every aspect
of development, including how children learn, think, emotionally
respond to and interact with those around them, their budding
understanding of others’ minds, and their developing personalities,
temperaments and skills. Children typically achieve developmental
milestones. These milestones reflect abilities that are achieved by most
children by a certain age, such as walking and talking. Among other
things, child psychology is interested in explaining how children reach
these milestones, and how individual differences between children
might influence their developmental trajectory.

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Figure 1 Child psychology focuses on how, when and why children develop
in the way they do

People are attracted to studying child psychology for both practical and
intellectual reasons. For example, research in child psychology has led
to techniques for teaching children strategies to control their anger or
make friends more easily. Child psychology research is also drawn on
to inform national decision making. Sure Start, for example, is a
national intervention in the UK which offers high-quality childcare to
children in economically deprived areas. The idea arose from findings
in child psychology research that children born into economically
deprived areas suffered significant setbacks in future schooling, and
that availability of high-quality care from early in life could redress this
social imbalance better than interventions later in education. This work
stimulated the UK government to invest millions of pounds in
provision. As well as recognising the problem and offering a possible
solution, child psychology was used to inform how best to implement
and support the new care centres, to evaluate what was working and
what was not, and to assess how changes should be implemented in
the future.
As well as practical applications, child psychology can also help us to
understand many of the intriguing questions about human nature, such
as why people are different from one another, how the mind works

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and why we are different from other animals. Many of these questions
are difficult to explore in adults because their thinking is so developed
and well integrated, but infants and children offer an opportunity to
examine reasoning and mental processing at their very roots.
Because child psychology is so vast and tries to answer so many
questions, researchers and practitioners often separate out development
into specific areas. Broadly, these tend to map onto children’s physical,
cognitive (thinking), social and emotional development. Some
specialists also focus on specific atypical developments, such as
children experiencing learning difficulties or developmental disorders
like autism or dyslexia. You will cover these topics in later chapters.
This chapter, meanwhile, will look primarily at children’s cognitive
development. Although research subdivides development into different
areas of interest, children grow up holistically, and practitioners have to
draw on different areas of research to support them.

Key points
. Child psychology tries to describe and explain development from birth
to adolescence.
. Child psychology is often divided into physical, cognitive, social and
emotional development, with some researchers focusing on atypical
development.
. Understanding how children develop can help parents and teachers
to support children more effectively, can inform policies regarding
children’s welfare and can answer intriguing questions about human
nature.

Key theories in children’s cognitive development

Like all fields of scientific research, child psychology is characterised by
different perspectives and theories that have shaped how our
understanding of development has changed over time. A theory of
child development is ‘a scheme or system of ideas that is based on
evidence and attempts to explain, describe, and predict behavior and
development’ (Slater and Bremner, 2003, p. 36). Researchers’ theories
will influence how they design their research, the sorts of questions
they try to answer and the manner in which they interpret their results.
Some theories argue that cognitive development must occur primarily

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through factors internal to the child which are biologically generated.

In contrast, other theories consider environmental factors, such as the
child’s social environment, to be more important in stimulating and
supporting development. A selection of popular theories that take
these two different perspectives are described below. Piagetian stage
theory and information-processing theory explain development through
factors that are internal and specific to the child, while Vygotsky’s
social cognitive development theory, behaviourism and other social
learning theories focus on the role of the people around the child in
supporting and eliciting development.

Cognitive development is primarily internally driven

Piaget’s theory of cognitive development
Shortly after the First World War, a Swiss biologist and teacher named
Jean Piaget (1896–1980) became interested in a new method for testing
children’s intelligence. The intelligence quotient (IQ) test was originally
developed by psychologists in France to target children who were
considered to be at potential risk of delay. The IQ test involved
presenting children with a series of questions and comparing their
overall individual performance against group averages for the child’s
age. Piaget noticed that children of the same age often made the same
sorts of errors in consistent ways. This led him to think that children
might think about the world in a substantially different way from
adults, a way that could not be explained simply through having less
experience. Piaget was a prolific researcher and eventually directed one
of the world’s first research institutes specialising in examining child
development. On the basis of his lifelong work, he developed a theory
that children develop in distinct stages, such that children in later
stages are biologically capable of understanding things that those in
earlier stages cannot (Piaget, 1929). Furthermore, he believed that
children moved through these stages as a result of accumulated
physical experience of interacting with objects in the world.
Piaget was especially interested in how children became able to form
mental representations of the world – that is, not only representing
what they saw in front of them but also being able to keep an object
in mind even when it had gone out of sight. He argued that this was
the basis for all thought and learning. For example, he showed that 8-
month-old infants fail to search for favourite toys that have been
hidden right in front of them, whereas 2-year-olds will not only search
for hidden objects but also have expectations of how those objects

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might behave while out of sight. He argues that, as children gain more
physical experience of the world, they become able first to mentally
represent objects, then to manipulate those representations and finally
to think symbolically – for example, recognising that words can
represent specific objects or people. Piaget felt that cognitive
development proceeds through a series of predefined biological steps
that are stimulated through physical interaction with the world. This
theory predicts that all children across the world should go through
these stages in the same order and around the same time, regardless of
differences in the environment that they are growing up in.

Figure 2 Jean Piaget, Swiss

psychologist

Information-processing accounts
Information-processing accounts are more recent theories which also
try to account for changes in children’s thinking, but view the human
mind as a complex system through which information flows in three
steps, much like a computer. First, the information is received from the
environment (through the senses) and encoded in some way. Next, the
mind acts upon the information through a range of internal processes,
such as memory storage, problem-solving strategies and the relating of
new information to old memories. Finally, the individual is able to use
the new information to change the way that they think or act. As
children develop, there are improvements in their brain functioning
(the ‘hardware’) and their abilities to process and make use of
information (the ‘software’), such that they can respond to the world

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with increasing adaptability and flexibility. Like Piaget’s theory of

cognitive development, information-processing accounts try to explain
how new levels of understanding develop from earlier, less advanced
ones, and tend to focus on development occurring within the child
through natural processes that are facilitated or obstructed by
environmental factors. However, unlike Piaget’s theory, information-
processing accounts tend to view development as continuous rather
than as occurring in separate, predefined stages.
Theories that arise from information-processing accounts of
development are often tested on computers which are programmed to
simulate the actions of the brain at the level of nerve-cell networks
that transmit information. These programs are called ‘neural networks’.

Development is determined by environmental factors

Vygotsky’s theory of social cognitive development
Piaget set the tone for much current research, but his theory has also
received a great deal of criticism. Many believe that he ignored the
huge influence that society and culture have in shaping cognitive
development. At the same time, another researcher named Lev
Vygotsky (1896–1934) had come to similar conclusions as Piaget about
cognitive development. Like Piaget, he thought children learned about
the world through physical interaction with it (Vygotsky, 1962).
However, where Piaget felt that children moved naturally through
stages of cognitive development based on biological predispositions
and their own individual interactions with the world, Vygotsky claimed
that adult or peer intervention when a child was on the edge of
learning a new task could help speed that process along. He referred to
this period as the ‘zone of proximal development’ in which people
around the child could ‘scaffold’ learning by helping the child to
achieve new understanding based on knowledge that he or she already
had. While Piaget thought that development occurred within the
individual and then extended to the social environment once certain
developmental milestones were achieved, Vygotsky argued that
development occurred first through a child’s immediate social
interactions and then moved to the individual level as children began
to internalise their learning. While Piaget saw the child as actively
discovering the world through their individual interactions with it,

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Vygotsky saw the child as more of an apprentice, learning through a

social environment of others who had more experience and were
sensitive to the child’s current learning needs and abilities.

Figure 3 Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky, Soviet psychologist. Vygotsky was the

founder of cultural-historical psychology

Behaviourism
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, psychologists began to
embrace experimental methods for exploring child development. Based
on work previously conducted with animals, behaviourists believed that
all that animals and human infants were born with was the basic
equipment to associate one thing with another – for example, coming
to associate crying with being picked up or the smell of their mother
with having milk. Behaviourists such as John Watson (1878–1958)
argued that all of the complexity and ingenuity of human thought
could be built on those simple early mechanisms. He showed that
complex, intelligent behaviour in animals could be elicited by simply
rewarding them for certain behaviours and punishing them for others.
Similar ideas of discipline and reward are still used in classrooms today.
For example, good behaviour might be encouraged though rewards
such as building up sticker charts, and bad behaviour punished through
the loss of stickers.

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Theoretical perspectives on language development

It may help to understand how these theories relate to each other
by considering how they would explain the same developmental
phenomenon – language. Children usually start to speak at
between 9 and 15 months of age, and their vocabulary increases at
an astonishing rate until late childhood.
Piaget placed very little emphasis on the role of language in
cognitive development. He felt that language development was
secondary to children’s increasing ability to mentally represent
objects abstractly, and arose as a consequence of being able to
think symbolically. Vygotsky, on the other hand, felt that language
was primary in cognitive development and that it was through the
internalisation of language that children began to think more like
adults.

Figure 4 Almost all children swiftly develop the means of

communicating with those around them but theories differ
in how this ability comes about
Behaviourists view language as arising through simple association:
through imitation and reinforcements, infants come to associate
words with specific objects and actions, and parents deliberately
reinforce this learning through encouragement.
Interactionist perspectives on language development (those that
take an internal and external perspective rather than prioritising one
over the other) emphasise the interaction between inner capacities
and environmental influences. For example, language might arise
because the brain has inborn information-processing mechanisms

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that make sense of language-like signals, and this lays the

foundation for learning more environmentally specific aspects (such
as intricate grammatical structures, moving from single words like
‘Gimme’ to more substantial sentences, ‘Please give me the ball’)
through imitation. Alternative interactionist perspectives might
suppose that infants have an inborn motivation to communicate
with those around them, and cue people around them to provide
appropriate language-learning experiences.
The same developmental phenomenon – learning language – can
be thought of as arising entirely from internal processes, external
influences or some combination of the two, depending on what
theoretical perspective you take.

Key points
. Theories in child psychology are systems of ideas based on evidence
that attempt to describe, explain and predict development.
. Different theories of cognitive development place different emphasis
on the role of the child’s social environment in development.
. A researcher’s theory will influence what their predictions are and
how they collect and interpret their data.

Asking questions about children’s development

There are a number of questions that have persisted since the
beginning of child psychological research. One of these, how nature
and nurture work together to shape development and explain
differences between children, will be discussed in greater detail in
Chapter 3. In this section, we will elaborate on just three enduring
questions – whether development is continuous or discontinuous, the
role of socio-cultural influences and the role that children play in
shaping their own development.

Is development continuous or discontinuous?

As mentioned earlier, some theorists believe that development happens
continuously, that infants have a set of skills that are gradually
augmented through experience to produce adult-like ways of thinking
about the world. The alternative is to think that development is

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discontinuous – that new and different ways of thinking about the

world emerge at various points in development. Remember that Piaget
was a proponent of discontinuous development; he believed that
development occurred in stages. Discontinuous models of development
assume that children go through periods of rapid transformation as
they move from one stage to the next, while continuous models
assume that development is more gradual. Research now suggests that
infants can represent objects that have gone out of sight (contrary to
Piaget) but cannot use those representations to guide their action (in
keeping with Piaget). For example, infants will not search for toys that
have been placed out of sight behind a screen right in front of them,
but look surprised if the screen is raised and the toy has disappeared
(Baillargeon et al., 1985). As research progresses, the enduring
questions have become more nuanced: rather than assuming that
development is continuous or discontinuous, it may be that some
aspects of development are continuous while others are not. For
example, the ability to mentally represent a toy that has gone out of
sight might be a continuous ability, present even in very young infants,
but the ability to use representations to coordinate directed search, to
remove barriers and to appropriately grasp the toy might all develop in
a more stage-like or discontinuous manner.

(a) Continuous development (b) Discontinuous development

Age Age

Development Development
Figure 5 Two ways of thinking about child development – (a) as continuous
(represented by a straight sloping line), or (b) as discontinuous (represented
by a series of steps)

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How does socio-cultural context influence development?

Children grow up in specific physical, social, cultural, economic and
historical circumstances (their socio-cultural context), all of which will
influence their childhood. Whereas Piaget’s stage theory assumes that
all children will go through the same set of stages in the same order at
roughly the same time, regardless of context or environment, this has
been disputed. Subsequent research has suggested that children’s socio-
cultural context can have a large influence on the time at which
children move from one stage to another. For example, children who
are taught specific strategies for solving problems might begin to
reason about those problems in a more advanced manner than those
who do not receive any explicit teaching in that particular area.
Development does of course involve a process of learning and
improvement. This does not conflict with Piaget’s stage theory, but it
does extend it to explain how some of the environmental experiences
that children receive can allow them to move from one stage to
another, in line with Vygotsky’s socio-cultural approach.

How do children shape their own development?

A lot of research focuses on the external influences that shape
children’s development and treat children themselves as relatively
powerless. But of course children have a role in their own development
and in selecting the sorts of environmental influences they are exposed
to. Even newborns select what to pay attention to by where they look
and orient themselves (usually towards the smell of milk!). Infants will
often try to elicit certain behaviours from adults by giving them cues
such as covering their eyes to play peek-a-boo. Indeed, infants’
sensitivity to very subtle communicative cues and the role of infants in
social interaction is surprisingly sophisticated. Aspects specific to the
child, such as their temperament, can also greatly influence how adults
and other children interact with them. Once children begin to speak,
they often drive conversations, expecting responses from adults or
asking questions. And when children begin to engage in pretend play
from around 2 years of age, they often take on new personas and roles
that help them make sense of different aspects of their world or deal
with things they are frightened of (Howes and Matheson, 1992). For
example, they may pretend to be superheroes fighting off monsters. By
the time children reach school age, they begin to make many decisions
about their environment, such as who to be friends with and what
interests to pursue.

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An introduction to childhood studies and child psychology

Figure 6 Children often use pretend play to engage with topics about which
they are frightened or confused

Key points
. Research suggests that some aspects of development may be
continuous while others are stage-like (discontinuous).
. Socio-cultural environment can have a large influence on the time at
which children move through developmental stages.
. Children play an active role in selecting the environmental influences
that they are exposed to.

Methodological considerations
We are all natural psychologists: we automatically think about what
people’s reasons and motivations are for acting as they do. However,
these everyday observations of behaviour are often unreliable, and our
impressions sometimes fail to account for the many factors that could
have contributed to the behaviour. According to Kellett (2008),
research within the context of psychology generally relies on the use of
a scientific approach that is:

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. sceptical – it assumes that all beliefs may be wrong no matter how

probable they seem, and
. systematic – it bases conclusions on methodical, step-by-step
observations and experiments.
Conducting research with infants, children and adolescents poses
special difficulties compared to psychological research with adults.
However, there is a range of methodological approaches that
psychologists have used to try to examine the underlying cognitive
processes involved in development.

Data collection
One important consideration for researchers is what sort of
information they are going to collect about child psychology and how
they are going to collect it. Like adults, older children and adolescents
can be asked what they think in interviews. Structured interviews are
consistent sets of questions about a specific topic, which are asked of
every participant so that responses can be compared. Unstructured
interviews are more free-flowing and, although the interviewer will
focus the discussion on a specific topic area they are primarily
interested in, the interview will be guided by the interviewees’
responses rather than by a specific set of questions. In many ways,
older children and adolescents pose less of a methodological problem
than young children and infants, because most of the methods
developed for exploring adult psychology are also appropriate for
them.
Interviews are an excellent method for exploring what a participant
thinks about a topic, what they understand about a particular area and
what their perspectives on the world are. However, there are some
general disadvantages in conducting interviews. The results depend
very much on what questions are being asked, responses can be very
detailed and therefore difficult to analyse and compare to those of
other participants, and the respondent might skew their responses for
any number of reasons – such as wanting to please the interviewer,
having misremembered an event or deliberately trying to give a false
impression. Interviews with younger children, even when they have
some language ability, can also be problematic, as children will often
change their answer if asked a similar question twice, assuming they
got it wrong the first time, or they may have a bias to respond the
same way consistently. For example, research by Fritzley and Lee
(2003) suggests that children aged 2 and 3 years have a bias towards

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saying ‘yes’ regardless of what the question is. When asked a series of
questions that they simply had to respond ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to, most 2- and
3-year-olds responded ‘yes’, even when the question was about
something they had no experience of, and they showed a reluctance to
say that they didn’t know the answer to a question, even when they
were told that this was an acceptable response.
Another approach is direct observation of children’s behaviours. Rather
than simply asking children what they think, sometimes we have to
infer what they think and how they respond to specific influences from
the way they behave. Because of the constraints of interviews listed
above, observations are often preferred and can sometimes reveal more
accurate information about people’s behaviour than they report in
interviews. Often, a combination of observations and interviews can be
used. When psychological phenomena of interest are being studied in
very young children, interviews may not be possible and observation
may be the most reliable form of data collection. Like interviews,
observations can be unstructured (naturalistic) or structured.
Naturalistic observations tend to take the form of detailed notes about
behaviour and what was happening in the context at each time point.
Structured observations, in contrast, usually focus on a set of specific
behaviours, and the observer simply codes whether and to what extent
each of these behaviours occurs during a set time period. For example,
observers might code whether a child passes or fails a task they have
set up for them, or how many times specific children in a class speak
without raising their hands.
Naturalistic observations tend to take place in children’s normal
surroundings, such as in their classrooms or homes. For example, if
you were interested in differences between the ways that parents of
children with behavioural disorders respond to bad behaviour
compared to those whose children have no behavioural disorders, you
might observe family interactions over dinner for a few evenings in
both families (Patterson, 1982). Naturalistic observations are a way of
collecting very detailed data about how children behave and interact in
the real world rather than under the less natural conditions of a lab.
However, because natural environments have so many different things
going on (e.g. brothers and sisters may be there, parents may have had
a bad day), it can sometimes be difficult to work out what the most
influential factors on behaviour are and, if the behaviour that you are
interested in is not frequent, you cannot be sure that you will capture
it within your time frame.

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Designing a psychological study

Another consideration facing child psychologists engaged in research is
what sort of design their research will take, experimental or non-
experimental. Both experimental and non-experimental research can
make use of observations and interviews as a way of measuring
people’s responses.

Experimental designs
Experimental designs are used when researchers need to know what
the cause of a psychological phenomenon is and are able to control
factors such as the similarity of the groups and the types of
experiences these groups encounter. Of course, non-experimental
research is concerned with explaining the causes of psychological
phenomena as well, but the advantage that experimental designs have
is in extracting only those factors that the researcher thinks are most
important and then testing specifically for any alternative explanations.
To try to maximise the chance that experiences are the same for all
children taking part, experiments often take place in laboratories,
where lots of the variation in environmental factors can be controlled,
or they take place in the same environment for all the different groups
tested. For example, if I wanted to know if a new teaching method was
more effective than the one currently in use, I might randomly select
two groups of children, apply the standard teaching method to
Group 1 and the new teaching method to Group 2, and then give
them a test. If Group 2 outperforms Group 1, then I might conclude
that the new teaching method is more effective than the standard one.
However, if the children in Group 1 and Group 2 were taken from
different schools and tested in different classrooms, then it would be
difficult to know whether the difference in test performance was due
to the teaching methods or, rather, because the groups differed in age
or academic attainment, or because the conditions of the classroom
were different – perhaps one was much hotter, making it difficult for
children to concentrate. Researchers conducting experiments will try to
keep all factors, except the one they are testing, the same for all their
test groups.
As Siegler and colleagues (2003) outline, there is a logic to interpreting
the results from an experimental design:

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An introduction to childhood studies and child psychology

1 If two (or more) groups of children are very similar at the

beginning, and
2 the children in one group are presented with experiences that differ
in only one way from experiences presented to children in the other
group, and
3 the children in the two groups behave differently after the
experiences, then
4 the different experiences must have caused the subsequent
differences in behaviour.
Although experimental designs are the strongest test of the cause of a
phenomenon, they are also very difficult to run well. First, a great deal
of work is necessary to determine what the important factors are that
contribute to a psychological phenomenon. Often it is only through
extensive non-experimental work, using observations and interviews,
that these factors become apparent. Because humans are very sensitive,
often unconsciously, to environmental influences, unpredicted factors
can influence results. This is especially the case with very young
children, who may not follow instructions about what to attend to. For
example, recent research suggests that infants will respond differently
to a task if the experimenter has made eye contact with them
beforehand, compared to if they have not (Topal et al., 2008).
Researchers designing experiments must consider all of these factors
and try to control for them. Finally, because so many factors have to
be controlled, children’s performance in experiments may not reflect
how they would perform in a more natural or familiar environment.
Children may react to the fact that they are interacting with an
unfamiliar experimenter, that they are being watched, that they are in a
strange environment or that they feel they are being tested.

Non-experimental designs
Because of concerns about running experiments or because some
factors simply cannot be controlled for practical or ethical reasons,
researchers also use non-experimental designs to explore psychological
phenomena. One common non-experimental design is a correlational
study. Correlational studies measure the frequency with which two
factors are associated – strong association means that the factors
predict each other – as one goes up, the other goes up or down at a
similar rate. For example, in 1944 a psychologist named John Bowlby
conducted a study comparing antisocial behaviour in boys who had

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been left for a period of time by their mother when they were under
the age of 5 (Bowlby, 1944). Clearly, it would have been unethical for
Bowlby to manipulate either factor – either asking the mothers to leave
their sons for any length of time or giving boys opportunities to
engage in antisocial acts. Therefore, this study had to be run as a
correlation where he simply looked at whether one factor went up as
the other did. He found that those boys who had been left committed
more antisocial crimes than boys who had not been left. He concluded
that any period of absence from the mother before the age of 5 years
could be detrimental to the social development of young men.
One of the difficulties of running correlation research, however, is that
you cannot be sure which factor is causing the other or, alternatively,
whether some other factor that the researcher hasn’t considered is
causing both. A subsequent replication of the study found that
antisocial activity in young men was more strongly associated
(correlated) with stress and tension within the family during early
childhood than it was with absence from the mother (Rutter, 1981).

When to test a developmental phenomenon

Child psychologists must also pinpoint when during development they
want to examine a specific psychological phenomenon. Psychologists
interested in how an ability changes with development normally study
children at different ages. There are two main strategies for doing this:
cross-sectional and longitudinal studies. Most child psychology research
uses a cross-sectional design. This means that a group of children from
each of the age groups of interest is selected and tested, and then the
average performance of their groups is compared. If, say, I were
interested in the age at which children started to read, I might compare
a group of 4-year-olds, a group of 5-year-olds and a group of 6-year-
olds to see when the majority started reading. Cross-sectional designs
can be relatively cheap and quick to run, but the researcher needs to
be careful that the groups of children do not differ in important
characteristics other than age.
An alternative method is a longitudinal design. With this, the
researcher tests the same children over a long period of time and
examines the age at which each one of them begins to learn to read,
for example. Longitudinal designs give much more detailed information
about each child than cross-sectional designs, and ensure that they
measure points of change by focusing on children over a longer period

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of time. However, they are difficult to run because they are very time-
consuming and expensive, and there is often a high drop-out rate of
children as they move or lose interest.

Methods for conducting research with pre-verbal children

Conducting research with children before they can speak or understand
instructions poses significant difficulties. For many years, psychologists
thought that it was pointless to study infants, given that they could not
communicate their thoughts. However, new approaches have been
developed that allow psychologists to assess infants’ responses. For
example, infants will suck a pacifier (dummy) harder or stop sucking
altogether when shown something new that they do not expect. Like
adults, infants also look longer when they see something unexpected,
and their hearts start to beat faster. Researchers design displays very
carefully and compare changes in these simple responses to infer what
infants and toddlers are thinking about the immediate world around
them. For example, 3-month-old infants repeatedly shown silhouettes
of dogs will look longer if they are suddenly presented with a
silhouette of a cat, suggesting that, at some level, they recognise that
dogs are different from cats, and they are surprised by this new
addition (Quinn et al., 2001).
Technological advances have also allowed researchers to collect even
more detailed information about how infants think about, and respond
to, their immediate environment. For example, non-invasive eye-
trackers can record exactly where an infant is looking throughout a
display and, therefore, what information they are attending to or where
they expect moving objects to appear once they have gone out of
sight. Another advance is in electroencephalograms (EEGs), which
measure activity in different areas of an infant’s brain while he or she
is presented with different displays. This technique has been used to
show that very young infants maintain the same electrical activity in
their brain when looking at an object and when the object has travelled
into a tunnel and out of sight. This evidence suggests that they may be
able to hold objects in mind when they have gone out of sight for
short periods of time (Kaufman et al., 2003).

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Figure 7 Infant wearing a geodesic sensor net – a cap

of electrodes that measures changes in electrical activity
on the infant’s scalp. This equipment can help researchers
understand which parts of the brain are active when infants
are exposed to different displays or images

Ethical considerations when conducting experiments

with children
All research with human beings poses some ethical issues, but
research with children is especially complex because it is
sometimes impossible to ask the child if they would like to take
part, or to explain what the research is about and what it will be
used for. Children are considered more vulnerable, as regards
harm and discomfort, than adults. Researchers have a vital
responsibility to anticipate and minimise any potential risks of their
research and to make sure, as far as possible, that the benefits of
the research outweigh any potential harm. There are national
bodies – such as the British Psychological Society (BPS) in the UK
and the Society for Research into Child Development (SRCD) in
the USA – that set out codes of conduct that must be followed by
all child psychologists, and which are based on principles of
respect for participants in their research, competence, responsibility
and integrity in conducting their work. Every study that a
psychologist wants to conduct must first be approved by an ethics
board at the psychologist’s place of work, which assesses their
proposed project for potential risks in line with this code.

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Some of the ways that psychologists minimise the potential risks of

their work is to ensure the following.
1 That parents of the children to be tested have been fully
informed of what the research involves and what will be done
with the data, that they have had the opportunity to ask any
questions and that they have given their full consent for their
child to take part. Where possible, consent must also be
received from the children themselves. In addition, where
research is being conducted in schools, full consent must be
received from teachers and heads to access the children.
Everyone involved must have had the full experiment
explained to them, including what will be done with the data,
and participants, families and teachers must have been given
an opportunity to ask any questions.
2 That both children and adults are made aware that they can
stop the research at any time, or withdraw their contribution.
3 That parents and, wherever possible, children are fully
debriefed about what the research was for and how the data
will be used, and be given the opportunity to ask any further
questions.

Key points
. Structured interviews can be used to explore how older children and
adolescents think about the world.
. Observation of infants’ and children’s behaviour in natural settings or
labs is often used to infer what they are thinking about the world.
. Experiments allow researchers to infer cause, but different factors
must be tightly controlled.
. Cross-sectional and longitudinal designs refer to different ways of
testing change.
. Numerous methods based on infants’ natural responses have been
developed.

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Conclusion
This chapter has briefly introduced you to some of the main ideas that
are central to child psychology, with a particular focus on early
cognitive development. Child psychology tries to describe and explain
all aspects of child development, including changes in children’s
cognitive, social and physical development, and to understand and
support children experiencing delays in their development. Some of the
dominant theories about children’s cognitive development have been
introduced; competing explanations focus on development within the
individual as against those that focus on the wider social and cultural
environment. These theories often seek to answer a number of
important psychological questions, which include explaining how
change occurs, the role of the socio-cultural environment and how
children shape their own individual development. In order to address
some of these questions, psychologists often conduct research with
children and young people using a range of methods and approaches
which include experimental and non-experimental techniques to try to
investigate the development of cognition and behaviour.

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