Lecture Recording Transcripts PDF

Hello everyone. We are just about ready to begin our coverage of research methods in the study of childhood. I want to use this class as a way to also go over for those that are going to be doing the child observation report as your project in this course, those of you that are choosing that option....

Hello everyone. We are just about ready to begin our coverage of research methods in the study of childhood. I want to use this class as a way to also go over for those that are going to be doing the child observation report as your project in this course, those of you that are choosing that option. I promised you that this would be the class in which I actually talk a little bit about that assignment. So I'm going to do that when we get to, we're going to get to it in a few minutes actually because if I were to ask you how we collect data about children, that fills up the research studies that you'll be reading about in your textbook. So your textbook is filled with the results of research. And those research studies are filled with data about children. And there are many different ways that we make that happen. And even just from the very short time that we've been together, you already know a lot about that because the very first class in which we first lecture, I should say, in which we talked about the history of the Child Study Movement. You gotta feeling for all the different ways that we began to collect data from children, all of which are still used. So you do have a bit of a sense of this, but we're going to go over it again. And I, I hope that if you've watched the video that some of you may have watched, that was for that first topic. I hope that you saw that there were some correspondences between the lecture and the textbook and that film. There's also a film for this very first topic, observations as a way of collecting data. The film for today's class is a very old film that is kind of a classic about how much you can learn from just observing children with a parent. Something that some of you may choose to do for your assignment for this course. So those two films, the first one and this one are the longest, I think, of any that you'll be asked to watch for this course, but they really sort of overlapped quite a bit with the course content, but they probably are the two longest ones, the others are much shorter. So the research techniques that are used in most of the studies it fill your textbook are going to be the ones that I'm going to go over now. And one that you do know about a little bit is called observations. Because I mentioned one of the very first folks to study children. Charles Darwin observed his own child and did those baby diaries or baby by Aaker, baby biographies filled with detailed observations about his own child. Of course we do it a little bit more in a more sophisticated way now, but the same elements are there, right? There's different types of observational studies and they have different kinds of advantages and disadvantages that we can talk about. But they all still have in common that what the researcher is doing is observing one child at a time usually and, and keeping very detailed. Notes are observations of what they're seeing. And the reason that some people like this so much is it's kind of, it's considered a rather natural or naturalistic way of collecting data because you're not really manipulating anything. You're just watching the child sometimes in their own home as I'm asking you to do, if you're comfortable. Not socially distancing by the time this would be du. And it is sometimes done in a school at a university, sort of research setting or, or another setting where the child is on is being observed. In in your cases, you would probably be taking notes about what the child is doing and what the child is saying if you choose to do the observation. Sometimes researchers have a checklist of things that they're looking for and every time they see an occurrence of that, those just check it off on the checklist. In some studies that's not what you'd be doing, but in some larger observational studies, they might have a whole video setup where they're videotaping the child either alone or with the child's parent. And then afterwards they'll transcribe that and sort of get the detailed information from observing the video that the type that are typically done and sort of what Darwin did and kind of like what you might do if you do this assignment are what are called continuous recordings. Because whether it's for just half an hour or let's say it's three years that you're observing a child. It you're just watching the behavior and recording and and, and what's being said and you're making notes of that are recording that. So it's called continuous recording because for a period of time, whether it's a short period or a long period, the child is being observed and information is being obtained that way through the observation. Let let's maybe before I talk about the other, the other types, let's talk about the advantages and disadvantages maybe of the continuous record type observation. So as you can imagine, other than my saying that it's sort of naturalistic. You also can get a very broad scope of behaviors if you're watching a child for whether it's half an hour, certainly if it's for years, you're getting, you know, just across many, many different areas of development. You're, you're watching and observing what the child is capable of. And there's a nice kind of continuity from that. If you're watching the same child for a long period of time, there's a continuity of development that you're getting as opposed to just a really quick, a quick snapshot. Of course, it's also important that for a very young child who doesn't speak yet, of course, doing observations makes a lot more sense then. Some of the other techniques we're going to talk about that would require the child to speak the child an infant, a one-year-old, two-year-old is not writing, so you won't be able to give them a questionnaire. So observations for children that are nonverbal, either because they're so young or because they are intellectually challenged and really are or, or have some, some communication disorders and aren't able to speak in observation would be a way to work with a non-verbal child as well. The disadvantages of doing a continuous record observation would be or any observation really a disadvantage would be that no observation is really completely pure. If you're the observer of a child, you bring certain attitudes, biases about children, to the observation that are going to influence what you write down, what you leave out, what you see. Basically you're going to be influenced by your notions about childhood or about children. And so it might not be a pure observation. It's also the case that if you're in a child's living room observing them as some of you might be. That leads to something called observer influence, right? That, that you you might influence the very behavior that the child or parent shows because given that you're there, they're not going to act the way they usually do. So observer influences when you're a very presence, changes the thing that you think you're getting an accurate picture of. But it's not because that's not the way they behave when you're not there. And the fact that observers are not pure observers because they have different biases that they bring into the room. Is cold observer bias that, that the observer might be selecting certain behaviors to record but ignoring others, his observer bias. So those are two things that you sometimes see as a disadvantage. It's also sometimes seen as a disadvantage that usually, usually an observation study is with fewer participants, fewer people are in the study than in some of the other types of study. So if it's a smaller study because of how in-depth it is and how time-consuming it might be. If your sample is small, sometimes it's harder to generalize the results of a study to a larger population if you have a very small sample size. So that could also be considered a disadvantage. I suppose now I said that there, there was whether just the continuous record type of observation. So let me quickly tell you about two other types of observations. One is called i'm time sampling. Time sampling observation. And what that would mean is that let's say I'm, I'm in a university research setting and I'm in the room where I'm watching the child and his or her pear and through a one-way mirror, looks like a mirror to them, but it looks like a window to me. I can actually see them. And I'm watching what's going on, but I'm doing it in certain periods of time. So for example, I might look up for. Four minutes, and then a buzzer goes off that letting me know that I should now look down for a minute and record my observations from that four minutes that I was looking up. Then after diminutive recording the observations of buzzer goes off and now by look up again for four minutes. So I look up for four minutes. I looked down and record for one minute. I look up for four minutes and I looked down and record for one minute, whatever the time is, it doesn't really matter. The point is that you're doing it in samples of time. And the idea there is that you are focusing on what you're watching. And then you look down and you record it. Then you look up again and you focus so that you're not watching and recording simultaneously. The problem is that of course, when you look up again after a minute or maybe it was longer that you were getting a buzzer to look down and do your recordings. If if you look up again, the behavior that you're seeing is now out of context and you don't really know what led to it. So if you're, you know, if you're observing in a preschool setting, let's say under a bunch of kids and you're focusing on one and you look up and the child that you're focusing on pushes somebody, you don't know what happened while you were looking down that might have provoked the child that you're watching to do that pushing, right. You don't know what the context of it is. So that could be a problem with time sampling. The other type of observation. So you've got the continuous record, the time sampling, and then there's something called events sampling. So that would be, let's say that we're in a preschool and I'm doing a study and a pre-school on preschool aggressive behaviors. And of course, we have to be very careful how we define the word aggression. For you. It might mean hitting somebody for me. It might mean I'm saying something nasty as well as any kind of physical physical aggression. So we'd have to make sure that whoever is doing the observations has been trained to understand what the word aggression means to try to get a handle on it. But let's say that looking at this preschool class and the childhood on focusing on like, you know, no one's being aggressive, which would be great and wonderful. But I can't really do any observing because the event that I'm looking for is aggression. And if it doesn't occur in the classroom, I've got no data. There is no data now, as far as I'm concerned, that would be great. But if you're doing a study on aggression and you don't have any data, that could be a problem. So with events sampling, you gotta wait for the event to occur, to start your observation. And if it doesn't occur, you don't, you don't have that data. So I want to go on to the other techniques that I've got listed on this page. But before I do so, I want to see if it's possible to do something without ruining this recording. And let's just see if I can do it. What I'd like to do is very quickly just pull up the syllabus. Okay. It looks like I was able to do it, which I'm very pleased about. I promised those of you that are thinking about doing the observation and you don't have to have chosen this yet. I mean, you don't have to know yet. I promised you that we go over the last several pages of your syllabus. I think this is Pages 111213 of your syllabus that deal with the observation. And let's just go over it kind of quickly because you're doing a little mixture of a continuous record plus your you also are going to be interacting with the child or you're going to ask the parent to do certain things so that you get at these activities. So, and I think I changed the assignment a little bit. So you might not have as much to do as normally when, when we're not in a, in a remote learning situation like we are right now. So if you choose to do this again, it would be with the child between 35 years of age, as it says at the top of this sheet, and it would be du by November the 12th. I don't want to ruin this. It will be due by November the 12th. If you choose this option, if you're choosing to do the video reaction option, this won't matter. So here's what it says. Basically obtain parental permission to observe the Cha for approximately a 25 minute period. Now, normally within his or her home at a convenient time, preferably following a child's nap. And then I've added, you may need to do this remotely with the help of the parent given the situation that is going on as I record this particular lecture on this particular day this semester, you may work with either a boy or a girl. No two members of class should work with the same child, nor should you use your own child or a member of your immediate family. The child should be someone that you do not know very well. Thus, You'll be more objective. I would strongly encourage you to observe and English speaking primarily child observe the child well, he or she is with one parent or caregiver, preferably no other children will be present. So you can just focus in on this child when appropriate, if in-person, explain to the child that you have to write and cannot play now, but you'll play in a little while. This would be for those of you that would be by the time this would be du comfortable being in someone's home and maybe you could be a little bit distant if the parents willing to help you with some of the other parts of this of this assignment. If the parent ask you questions about your observations, explain that since you're a student just learning about infancy and early childhood, you're not in a position to interpret your observations. Also assure the parents that your observations will remain anonymous. You will not tell me the child's name. I will not see a picture of the child. I might know there firstName and their initials, but I will not know their full name and I will not see a photo of the child. This assignment is just a way of integrating what you're learning about in class with the behavior of real children. And then number four, you will record all the child's behaviors. They're verbalization, that is their language, and any interactions with the parent that occurs. You'll see that the next sheet in your syllabus shows you a sample of what this would look like. A record sheet with two columns will be used. One column has had a child and the other is headed mother, father, or whoever is with them, whatever adult caregivers with them, if it's a grandparent to babysitter. Would be the other column. For those for those first 25 or 30 minutes that you're just watching, you are not expected to record time precisely, but try to record the approximate time involved in different activities. The observation records should be objective, detailed, well-integrated, and the sequence of events and behaviors should be clear. Examples of any relevant materials, for example, a child's drawing or a photo if they're drawing, that should be attached to your paper. If you have access to a tape recorder or a video camera. And I say that you may take this interaction, but I'm really not sure that videos could be used without us making sure with University Park, that was okay because now the person's identity is known. So I would keep going back and forth about the video camera. I think this semester it may be better not to, not to do a video recording. You will still need to take notes, however, about the non-verbal behavior that occurs, It's also wise to write down as much of what is said is you can't even if you're recording because it's difficult to transcribe some of these things. And sometimes as we know, the technologies go wrong. So generally I'd be writing what you're seeing, what you're hearing as it's happening. And again, you might if you're doing this remotely need to ask the parent to help you with some of the some of the other issues that we're about to talk about having observed the child for approximately 20 or 25 minutes, spend the next five or ten minutes engaging the child in at least two. Sorry. Try not to touch the recording because I don't want the the Stop button to accidentally be hit by me. Engaging the child and at least to pre-plan structured activities. Ideas for these activities can be derived from text, videos that you're watching and lectures. For this section, the record should be continued now with one column for the child and one column for you, the observer. So if you're there in person doing these things, then the child and you would be e to the two columns. If you're having the parent if you're directing the parent as to what you'd like them to do to carry out one of your activities. You might also need to include the parents in their since you'd be requesting their help with carrying out the structured activities. And I promise you that by the time you would do the observation, you wouldn't, you would have had a lot of examples from me, from the textbook and from videos that you're watching about how to do some of these activities. And then after I'm typing a report of all of your observations, that is the child with the other adult, the child with you. You would then relate all of that observed data, the unstructured stuff for the first 25, 30 minutes, and then the structured stuff that you did as part of your activities to material covered on in class and textbook by that time. And there's some tables in your, in your textbook that might be helpful because they give you ideas about what to expect at certain ages. And physical and motor development is what you'd be looking at to see if what the child did is consistent with what would be expected for a child their age, cognitive or intellectual development, language development, social development, personality development, things that we will have talked about, you will have read about just to sort of relate that material to the child that you were observing. And no extra outside reading is required. This part of the project is intended to allow you to demonstrate your understanding of the, some of the basic concepts covered in this course and your recognition of their relevance to real life situations. Okay? And then a sample of what the first few minutes might look like is that you might say on Tommy and mother as your two columns. And you know, at 220, Tommy finished drawing, held it up near the mother's face. Look at mommy, the mother glass. It's up from eating a magazine. Very nice, tiny, What is it? I know that the Mother said that after this because this comes down further on the page and it's under the mother's column, then I know that the next thing that happened was over here because of the way it's written up. So I know if something's lower on the page it happened after and if it was right next, just something I know what happened at the same time. So that's how I know the sequence, right? So these different these different entries would give me some idea of what happened in the first few minutes. If the child comes over and says, what are you doing? You say I'm busy writing and I can't talk to you now, but you can promise them that you'll play with the later because you will be doing activities with them later. Alright. And that would go on for like 25 or 30 minutes. And then it would be two columns, you and the child or you, the child and the parent, if the parents helping you carry out the activities. And then this is the the record sheet of 20 points. That is what you can earn for this. And, and the way that you get that each section tells you right? So you know that I'm expecting there to be a, a nice completion of completeness of the actual record of the two rows, the two columns. Rather that I want you to be objective and sort of write down as much as you can of what really happened. You do at least two of those structured activities and that they're from different areas of development, right? So if you do one that is getting IT motor development than your other one should not be about motor development. It should be from one of the other aspects of development. Okay, so you want to have two different areas of development manifested in your two different activities. And then your conclusions are how all of that relates to class material, and then just how neatly written up it was and whether you follow directions and there weren't a lot of errors would be worth two points and it adds up to 20 points and it's not quite the same as an exam that would be worth 45 or 50 points, but it is, it is important, right? So that's, that's the material. And if you have any questions about that, certainly, just let me know and now let's see if we can easily get back to the PowerPoint. Great. So let me make it more into the slide show. So we'll just so we already did the first one was the observations. The second one is questionnaires. You might remember when we went over the history of the child's studied movement, we said that, you know, there were observations used rather early on in the history of the Child Study Movement and questionnaires where as well. And question your stiller used. Now, if if the child is very young, then the questionnaires might be directed at the child's parents or the child siblings or the child's teachers. But if the child's older and can fill out a questionnaire, then the child might be the person who's filling out the questionnaires. And you'll see throughout your text, I'm sure that you'll see studies in which questionnaires were used, especially with older children. So that would be sort of a, a, a paper and pencil kind of question answer, question answer kind of thing, or an online question, answer, question answer kind of thing. If it's a face to face or phone question, answer kind of thing, that would be called an interview. That can happen with a child. You can interview a child. You can interview the child's parent about the child. You can interview teachers about children in their classroom, all with permission. You're going to see when we talk about ethics next time that you have to get permission to do all of this. But these are different ways of collecting data about children, right? It can be done with observations, questionnaires, interviews. And each of these different techniques has its own set of advantages and disadvantages. You can imagine if you thought about questionnaires and interviews, you can imagine that there'd be some advantages. Certainly you can get a lot more people in a shorter amount of time to fill out a questionnaire then to to, to sit into a long interview with them. So, you know, it's an advantage of a questionnaire that you can get a whole bunch of them out to a lot of people at one time. The problem is that if the people don't understand the words that you're using in your questionnaire or they don't take it seriously, then you know, the data that you get back might not be all that accurate in interviews. If you're interviewing a parent about their child and they may not want to tell you the truth about the way they discipline their child, or they may in fact forget certain things like if you ask them when the child first walked, they may not remember the real age at which that child first walk. They, you know, not not because they're trying to lie to you, they just simply don't remember, but they give you a number just because they want to please you write and you might write it down as data, but it isn't it isn't factual. And so, you know, or they might you say, do you do you yell at your child a lot? A lot might mean something to one parent, but something quite different to another. So you might not be getting get accurate information as much as you would like today. Another and definitely this is going to fill your textbook in terms of research studies that use tests as a way to, to, to get data about children. So intelligence tests, certainly of the news we mentioned had been a starting those in 1905 and ever since then, intelligence tests have been used to collect data about children's intelligence. Clinical assessments are a kind of testing, right? When we test, you know, if you, if you want to know whether a child is clinically depressed or if a child should be diagnosed with attention deficit disorder. There are assessments, so, you know, it's another word for tests to sort of see if the child it's not so much at the child would get a right or wrong score the way they might on an, on an intelligence test. But they might get a score that would indicate that they have met the requirements to get a diagnosis of attention deficit disorder or depression. So it's an evaluation of some sort of the child's answers or of their behavior that goes on with testing. It might be right, wrong, it might be typical, atypical, normal, not normal. On another kind of assessment or testing that is done with children with other age groups too. But you'll hear me talk about this, especially with infancy is what I call physiological testing. But in your textbook I think they call it psycho physiological assessments. So for example, how do we know whether or not a baby as afraid? We might not be able to ask them and they might not be able to tell us. But if we are assessing their heart rate when they're in a certain situation and their heart rate changes when we do something that we think might make them feel afraid, then we might use that as an indicator of fear of a psychological state of fear because their heart rate changed. That. So those are referred to as psychophysiological assessments when you're using something sort of biological about the child to give us some data, possibly about something else. So you will, you will see a lot about testing in, in the studies in your textbook. And I'm sure that that doesn't surprise you. So those are some of the commonly use research techniques with children that are used to get data. Now let's move on to let me try. It's not letting me. Okay. So before I talk about other other aspects of research with children, let me just make sure. And this is hardly a substitute for a research methods course. This is just a really quick overview. And for those of you that have taken other courses of mine, if you're in other courses of mind this semester, this might sound very repetitious because I sometimes cover research methods in courses at different points along the lifespan because I think it's important before we really get into the course material. So this might sound familiar to you, but some of you were sort of new to this field. And I just want to make sure that you know what some of the basic terms are. Stig, you might not know what a variable is and every research study contains at least two variables. So it's important that you sort of know what the word variable means. And the, the word really has to do with just pretty much any characteristic of an individual or a group of individuals that is not a constant, that can vary. So right now if we were all in the classroom together, what might be a variable in our classroom that I could include in a study I could include eye color would be different. It would not be a constant in, in a class of 40 students. Skin color would vary, age, would vary, height, would vary, weight, would very number of hours spent per week studying would vary, grade point average would vary. Anything that varies would be considered a variable and could be included in a research study. If however, let's see, you're all humans, so that's not a variable. You're all in college, so that's not a variable. So I wouldn't be able to, if I wanted to do a study comparing 18 to 22-year-olds in college to ones that weren't, I wouldn't be able to have you be the only people in my study because you're all the college students, it's a constant for you, it's not a variable. So a research study usually contains minimally two variables, two things that vary. And that leads to different kinds of ways of thinking about those variable. So one way is to think of those two variables, two or more variables in a correlational way. I don't know if you've ever heard of these terms. If you've read the chapter readings, you will have seen these, these words up and these types of research studies will definitely be throughout your textbook. So a correlational method being used in a study is where the researchers are looking for the relationship or co, relationship. That's why it's called Cole relational between at least two variables. Okay, so let's say we're looking at the relationship between height and age. Well, it may be the generally, especially if we're looking just at kids over the first 12 years of their lives, that there is a relationship between age and height. Maybe a positive relationship, meaning that as one goes up, the other one goes up. Now, the thing about correlations is it tells you the two things are associated, that height and age are associated. But it doesn't tell you that one is the cause of the other. It doesn't mean that age causes height because it really doesn't. If you think about it, a 95-year-old is very old, but they might be shorter than someone who's 14. So age does not cause height. And height does not cause age. They just are associated with one another. They're just correlated. Meaning that if I know where you are on one of those measures, I might be able to predict where you are on the other. If you bring a seven-year-old into the classroom and you don't tell me their age, but you tell me their height. I might be able to predict roughly their age. I might know that they're not a two-year-old and I might know there not a 22-year-old on I might be able to predict this is how we use your You know, the, the, the, the reason that we use SAT scores as one of the predictors of college success is because there's such a high correlation between the score and your GPA at the end of the first year of college that they relate to one another so positively that one can be used as a predictor of the other. So that's correlational or does not show cause. If you want to know whether something causes something else, generally people then use what's called the experimental method, okay, where there still would be at least two variables, but the variables would be of a different nature than with a correlational method. One of the variables in an experimental method might be considered what's called the independent variable. Again, if you've had any basic Psych course, you probably know this already. And you're looking for the effective that independent variable on another variable, which is called the dependent variable. And much of this course is going to be about how age affects whatever it is that we're starting at that point in the course, Motor Development, intellectual development. Now, the crazy thing about age being called an independent variable is this. Those of you that have had, had this, if you've had this material before, you know, the generally it independent variable, something that the researcher manipulates. So let's say I do a study in which I have one group of children watching an aggressive adult. And the other group of children is watching a non aggressive adult. And then after they have view those two very different types of people, we see how the children behave when they're in a free place situation afterwards. If we see the children that were in the aggressive model situation behaving more aggressively than the other kids. And if we assume that these two sets of children were pretty much identical in all ways except for the fact that one viewed an aggressive adult model and the others did not. If we see that the group that saw the aggressive adult behave much more aggressively afterwards in play. We might be able to say that seeing that aggressive adult is what caused them to play more aggressively. That's generally the way you think of independent, dependent variable. The thing that you manipulated a, how much aggression that children were watching is what causes the difference in your dependent variable. The thing is about age were really not manipulating age. I mean, you can't change somebody's age. You can't say today you're 17, Tamar, you're 21. I mean, we can't manipulate age the way we can manipulate stress levels, or what children are exposed to if we're setting up different situations for them to watch. But age is often seen as an independent variable in developmental research of the sort that your textbook is filled with. Because the researcher can control who they include in a study. They, they can control what ages they include in their study. And therefore, even though we can't manipulate age, you can control who's in your study. And so ages sometimes, you know, like a proxy independent variable. And everything that you're looking at to see if it varies as a function of age is seen as the dependent variable. So much of this course is sort of, you know, what changes as kids get older, you know, how is it that age, you know, is the cause of all of these changes. And so that's pretty much what, you know, you're going to be seeing now, here's the problem with that. Most of the traditional classical research designs assume that age is that independent variable and that, that behavior that you're seeing changes in is, you know, basically the dependent variable. So let me show you what those are. The two classic research studies. Well, this is the overall summary of everything you're about to see because there's a lot about to come and I just wanted you to know what we're going to say first, I'm going to go over with you the classical developmental research designs. They talk about these in your textbook, cross-sectional and longitudinal. Almost every studying your checkbook is either cross-sectional or longitudinal. The problem with that is because they focus on just Age as the independent variable and then the changes in behavior as the dependent variable, as the developmental thing. They actually miss a few other things that are really varying at the same time. It's not just age that's varying in these studies, something, some other things are varying that really could explain the results. And because of that, even though this fills your textbook, fills all textbooks in developmental research, we really might not be getting fully accurate results. And so because of that, I wanted to tell you what these are, but also tell you that we should be a little skeptical on and should be thinking when you read the results of studies that maybe this isn't a complete picture. There are other designs that have been suggested as ways to correct the problems with these classical designs, these newer designs, not so new now, but really people aren't using them very much because I really don't know why. I don't want to act like I know the reason that people aren't choosing to use designs that would correct some of the flaws of these more traditional designs up above. But I'm going to very quickly without expecting you to know very much about them at all, just tell you a little bit about the sequential designs and why they are used as corrections for the ones up above. And I'm not going to go very much into ones that are also sometimes recommended there a little simpler than the sequential designs, but of course haven't name that's almost identical called sequences. But the point is, most people do these even, even though for decades now we know that these have some problems and I want to tell you what those problems are. But then we're going to move on and, and continue to talk about the studies in your textbook. I just want you to have in the back of your mind though that, that there are these issues. So, you know, I I've attached these PowerPoint notes to your, to your modules on, I'm actually going to go ahead here. And this table, which took me a little while to do in PowerPoint, I'm, I'm sort of knew what PowerPoint looks a little bit better in the PowerPoint presentation than it does, for example, in your notes. And I don't quite know why that is, but like This last letter over here in this word comes down to the next line in the PowerPoint notes and I've tried to correct it and I just can't, so I'm just going to go over this with you. And if you do look at the notes, you'll just know that some things are a little a little off for whatever reason it didn't translate as I would have hoped in a couple of cases. So let me tell you, I already said that the classic designs, the classic developmental research designs, are these two, the cross-sectional and longitudinal. So let's take a look at what they look like. If in 2010, that's the time of measurement. If in 2010, I am given a cross-sectional study, let's say I'm comparing the language skills of one-year-old, one-year-old, three-year-olds and five-year-olds. So I get a group of one year olds. Now there one in 2010, they were born in 2009. These numbers in green over here are their year of birth. Do you see that's called their cohort or I'm calling it here, the historical affects their year of birth degeneration, that they're part of. The group that was born in 2009 or one year old in 2010. The group that was born in 2007, or three or three year in 2010, and the group that was born in 2005 or five in 2010, I get a group of one-year-old, three-year-olds and five-year-olds. I assess them on their language skills. Maybe I do an observation, maybe I interview the parents or the teachers, or I do a questionnaire with the parents or teachers made the eye dual language assessment testing kind of thing. And I compare the, the average of the one year olds to the average of the three roles to the average of the five-year-olds. That's a cross sectional study. You're basically getting a cross-section of ages at one time of measurement, maybe to assess them all on the same day, but around the same time. That's called cross sectional. Notice that I have over here that the numbers that are in the chart or the child's ages, that's the ages of the children. Now, on the other hand, let's say instead of doing a cross-sectional study, you do something called a longitudinal study. Longitudinal, and it's this l that I just, I'm in the PowerPoint knows just kept go into the line below longitudinal. What does that mean? That means we're actually having the same children more than once. Be part of our study. We go to agree with three-year-olds. They were born in 2007, but it's now 2010 there three, we wait two years and we go back and we reassess them in 2012 when they're five. Then we wait two years and we go back and we reassess those same children or as many of them as we can get you when there are seven case. So 357 year olds, same children over time, more than twice we chew or more times rather, if you assess them two or more times, it's considered a longitudinal study. Those are the classic study designs, research designs. Your textbook is mostly going to be cross-sectional studies, some longitudinal studies. The problem with that, which by now was pretty obvious to you, is. Now I'll go back to the page before this one in the notes. In addition to these children varying an age, there's something else that's varying in the cross sectional design. Not only do these children have different ages, which should be the only thing that's varying if we're doing a research study, the only thing that should be varying is the variable that we're focusing it on. Nothing else should vary because then we don't know what causes the results. If kids are 135 in 2010, they had to have been born in different cohorts. 200520072009. Now, the fact that these only differ by two years is not a huge difference. But you can imagine that there are studies in which you might have, you know, ten years between the groups in your study, there would be a 10-year gap in the year, in the year of their birth. And that might be a very significant issue right now though the point is that age in a cross-sectional study is confounded with or merged with. It can't be separated from the year of the child's birth. So age is not the only variable here that could be causing the results. It could also be the, the cohort, the year of the child's birth might be the reason for there. Performance on whatever the dependent variable is. The only thing that's constant here is the time of measurement. So let's go back a page here. And on this page it says the classic developmental designs. The first one is cross sectional. Time of measurement is constant, but age is confounded with cohort. So the problem with a cross-sectional study is that age is confounded with cohort. So if I do such a study as many of the authors in your textbook did. And I say that age is the reason for the differences in performance in my different age groups. You know, you and I might now say, well, maybe it was due to age, but it could be due to the cohort group, the child within and not their age. Or it could be a little bit of both. Maybe it was age and cohort that led to the differences that we're seeing. But you can't conclude that it's just age because you've got this messa with cohort in there and you have to be able to separate those out, which you'll see those newer designs allow us to do. So what's the problem with a longitudinal design? Well here look at the longitudinal again. It is the case that we've got three-year-olds than we wait till they're five, than we wait till they're seven. The problem with that though, is not only they're not only is their age varying, we're also measuring them at three different times if measurement so are the changes we're seeing in those kids due to changes in their age or changes in what's going on in the world around them, what I'll call here environmental effects. Could it be that something happened in the world around them between 20102012 or 20122014 that caused whatever it is that we're seeing in their dependent variable and that it wasn't due to age or age alone. The only thing that's constant with the Longitudinal Study is the year of birth. All these kids were born in the same generation because it's the same kiddos, right? It's the same kids. So that's why up above. I said that for the longitudinal study, cohort is constant there from the same cohort. But age is confounded with time of measurement. And therefore, you can't really conclude anything about age and be completely accurate because age is mixed up with time of measurement, you'd have to do a design that pulls those two apart cleanly, neatly and clearly to be able to say really whether age had an effect, whether the other variable had an effect, or whether it was a little bit of both of them, right? And that's what you can do if you do these sequential designs. So let me go to that next table and then I'll on it. Go to what a sequential design is. This is a cohort sequential research design. And with the cohort sequential research design, what we're doing really is we're getting too little, I think up above, up above. I said it's like too little to little longitudinal studies. A cohort sequential design corrects. What we were saying is the traditional cross-sectional study. This corrects it because it, um, confounds age and cohort. So let's go look at it again. It's too little longitudinal studies, three to five, these are the same kids as these kids were three. We wait two years to their five. In 2012, we pick up another group of three-year-olds and we wait two years until their five. So it's like two little longitudinal studies. But because we are testing three to five-year-olds at two at Excuse me, because we're testing three to five-year-olds who are from two different cohorts. We can determine based on our results, whether the results we got happened in each of those cohorts the same way. So let's say we're testing these kids on intelligence. And I'm three-year-olds to five-year-olds in this cohort increased about ten points and our IQ over these two years, same thing happened to this group of three to five-year-olds. So now we know that that is definitely due to their ages. It's not because of cohort, because they're from different cohorts. So something must really be going on between 35 if we get the same exact difference in two different cohorts between 35 year olds. If however, we get no difference between these three-year-olds and when they're five. But we get a 10-point difference just with this group than we know. That's a cohort effect because it only happens in one cohort. If we get a five-point difference in this group, but a 10-point difference in this group. It tells us there's a little bit going on about age and a little bit going on about cohort. For those of you that have taken statistics, that would be an interaction as compared to an age main effect or a cohort main effect, that would be an interaction which you don't need to know. But the point is that it cleans up the problem of the age and cohort issues being confounded in the old cross sectional design. This pulls them apart and allows you to know how much of your results are due to age, how much of your results are due to cohort? How much might be due to an interaction between the two. Okay? Now. Let's go make sure that's what I said in the slide up above on confounds agent cohort. Now time of measurement is confounded, but that's not that important to you and the kind of study you're doing. So maybe you're just concerned about aging cohort being cleaned up. So now only one variable is confounded as opposed to two of the various being confounded. So that's an improvement. At least it, it's an improvement. All right. Now there's another kind of sequential study in addition to the cohort sequential. There's one called The Time sequential. This would be a correction for the classical longitudinal studies. So if you really want to unconfined age from time of measurement, you're concerned about the possibility that the thing you're interested in studying might be due to age, but it might also be due to things that are changing in the world around the kid. Then you might want to clean that up a little bit and do this kind of design. The only, there is still something confounded here, but at least you've on confounded two of the three variables from one another. And this is what this one looks like. This is a time sequential research design. So what you have here is you're looking at three and five-year-olds at in 2010, three and five-year-olds in 2012. And I guess the arrow really should be going the other way. That's my bad, I'll have to change that. But what you're doing now is you are separating out age and China's measurement. And you, if you get a difference between the three and five-year-olds here, but you get no difference between 35 year olds here, then you know, there's a ton of measurement issue going on. If you get the same amount of difference between on three and five-year-olds, then you know that it say, you know, that it is a age effect. If you get the same exact amount, no matter what type of measurement you're looking at three to five-year-olds. If you get a five-point difference here and a 10-point difference here, that it's a little bit of both, that's a little bit due to age because they both change. But it's also different depending, you know, there's a different a different amount depending on which type of measurement you're looking at. So that would be called an interaction. So these are, these, you get a little bit more information from these, but people just simply aren't using them. They're just simply not using them. So that's an issue. Anyway. I think that might be let me just see if there was anything else. Oh, I just wanted to mention to you, even though not only does your textbook not have many cohort, sequential or time sequential designs, there might be one or two and the whole textbook, that's how rarely people are using them. I don't know anybody that does the sequence is but the reason I brought them up is the sequences do not require that the children being tested at different times of measurement are the same children that you got to before. So for example, with a sequence, these would not have to be the same children, right? It could be a different set of three-year-olds from the five-year-olds that you look at it another time. So it makes it a little easier possibly to conduct them, but not many people in fact do use them. So with that said, that's just an introduction to research methods. The next class is going to be about the ethics of conducting research with children. And that might overlap if you've had me for an ethics course, I certainly spent a lot of time talking about that in the ethics course, but this is something before we really get started with the course that I want you to think about is that while we talked about the ways that you might collect data and the different designs you might use. It's also terribly important that you do it in a way that honors the rights of the children. And that doesn't in any way violate their rights. So that's what we'll do next time. Thank you so much.