Developmental Psych Lab

Students in this course gain hands-on experience designing and conducting research in developmental psychology. The course familiarizes students with the theoretical and ethical issues involved in research on psychological development and the methods used in developmental research-including naturalistic observation, experimental and quasi-experimental designs, video coding, content analysis, structured interviews, and questionnaires. Students work with materials and data from studies of parent-child interactions and longitudinal studies spanning infancy to childhood and adulthood. Working independently or in teams, students search the literature in a selected area of infant, child, or adult development, design a research project, collect and analyze the data, give a conference-style presentation of their results, and write a paper in the style of an empirical journal article.