Child Developmental Psychology Research Design

Design an observational research design to study children under the age of 11 years old. Must choose one of three possible topicsscaffoldingself-awarenesscategorization

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Assignment Critical thinking skills are needed to effectively study the behaviour of others. Developmental psychologists conduct research studies as a way of learning about the behaviour of children and how behaviour changes over time. They have to think critically about why and how they will ask their research questions, they have to cleverly design studies and analyse the results, and then they must think about how the results will be interpreted and applied. The goal of this assignment is to give you experience as researchers in thinking critically about how you would study the behaviour of children. Researchers use different methods to collect data about children. In this assignment you will be asked to use only the observational method. The observational method is the most common method used in child development and you have already learnt about it from your textbook. Observational studies assess the behaviour of children by watching how and how often they do something of interest. Researchers observe how the behaviour’s occurrence, frequency, or quality changes or doesn’t change over a short or a long period time. Giving children or parents a questionnaire to take home and answer is NOT an observational method of collecting data. Interviewing children and parents to get their opinions or memories IS an observational method because you are observing and recording their responses. Recording how fast or how long a child spends in a task is also an observational method because you are observing their behaviour.Suppose you are interested in early speech and language development and want to know how English-speaking children come to make the “th” sound when they say words like “thirsty.” You might decide to conduct a “longitudinal study.” You would choose a group of children of the age that you have a reason to study. Note that the observation of one child alone would not be enough to generalize to other children. You might decide to simply watch and listen…

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