Advantages And Disadvantages Of Developmental Psychology

2. There are three commonly used methods used by developmental psychologists that influence our understanding of development, case studies, longitudinal studies and cross-sectional studies. These methods may involve correlational or experimental designs. Case studies involve researchers to systematically collect data from observations, unstructured interviews, diaries, personal notes, and information are based on qualitative measures, which has advantages and disadvantages. Advantages of using qualitative data are the descriptive style, narrated by the close observation of the researcher, providing an in-depth look into the developmental stages and behaviors. Thus, qualitative data may provide insight into relationships, causes, and effects

Speech perception and early language comprehension research has demonstrated that children begin understanding and learning language well before the development of motor skills required for verbal language. In addition, research findings indicate that both biology and experience contribute to development. In DeCasper and Spence’s article, they found that infants prefer maternal sounds after birth, signifying how biology and experience work together to influence development in speech perception and early language, showing that infants begin to hear during the 3rd trimester of pregnancy and prefer sounds heard during that time. Conducting an experimental design, implementing the sucking measure, they hypothesized that reinforcing sounds introduced before birth would increased sucking responses in infants, indicating that infants are able to learn and remember stories or sounds heard in utero. Thus, babies were presented with a target story that was exposed to them before birth and a comparing novel story that was unfamiliar to them while simultaneously measuring the responses rate of sucking. Results showed that babies would increase sucking rate when associations were made while listening to the familiar target story and not when listening to the novel story, indicating auditory capabilities before birth influence speech perception and early language development. In the article by Tincoff and Juscyzk, further evidence that both biology and the environment influence development, with the research they conducted investigating word comprehension in infants six months of age, specifically, word comprehension of body parts. Using a visual fixation method of measure in their experimental design, they hypothesized that an infant 3-4 months of age is able to attach words to memories of sounds and form categories. Thus, showing that biological development in brain cognition influences the ability to perceptually memorize and organize words for early language development.