1.1 Perspectives on Adult Development and Aging
• What are the premises of the life-span perspective?
• How are population demographics changing around the world, and what difference does it make?
1.2 Issues in Studying Adult Development and Aging
• What are the four basic forces in human development?
• What are the major characteristics of normative age-graded, normative history-graded, and nonnormative influences?
• How do nature and nurture interact?
• What are culture and ethnicity?
• In what ways can age be defined? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each definition?
• What is the stability-change issue?
• What is the continuity-discontinuity issue? What kinds of theories derive from each view?
• What is the universal versus context-specific development issue, and how does it relate to sociocultural forces?
1.3 Research Methods
• What are the reliability and validity of a measure?
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What are the three main approaches scientists use to measure behavior in adult development
and aging research? What are the strengths and weaknesses of each?
• How do we know whether a sample is representative?
• What is an experiment? What information does it provide?
• What is a correlational design? What information does it provide?
• What is a case study? What information does it provide?
• What are age, cohort, and time-of-measurement effects? How and why are they important for developmental research?
• What is a cross-sectional design? What are its advantages and disadvantages?
• What is a longitudinal design? What are its advantages and disadvantages?
• What differences are there between cross-sectional and longitudinal designs in terms of uncovering age differences and age changes?
• What are sequential designs? What different types are there? What are their advantages and disadvantages?
• What are the limitations of the extreme age groups design?
• What steps must researchers take to protect the rights of participants?
Integrating Concepts in Development
• Analyze each of the four major controversies in development in terms of the four developmental forces. What real-world examples can you think of that are examples of each combination of controversy and force?
• Using yourself as an example, figure out your age using chronological, perceived, biological, psychological, and sociocultural definitions. How do they differ? Why?
• Using the Leah and Sarah vignette as an example, design cross-sectional, longitudinal, and sequential studies of two different styles of caring for people with Alzheimer’s disease. What will you learn from each of the studies?