Chapter1 – Concept of development

 

Presentation

This is an introduction to the remaining content in the program. Knowledge and contributions by main authors working on this discipline will be reviewed. These changes happen to people in life and can be explained through coupled factors:  continuity versus discontinuity, inheritance versus environment, rules versus ideography. Understanding the context in which individuals develop is helpful to understand their evolution better. It is therefore necessary to highlight the historic, socio-economic, cultural and even ethnic context, just to cite the most important ones. Finally, it must be highlighted that development must be understood as a continuous, global, very flexible process.

 

Objetives

After reading and understanding the chapter, the student will be able to:

• understand the concept of “development”
• know which factors and contexts can influence in development.
• know the theoretical models that explain development.

 

People change with age in many ways and aspects. This chain of changes is known as development. At this point, it is advisable to explain several concepts that are similar but nonetheless different:

• Growth: It refers to quantitative changes related to the increase in body mass.
• Maturing: It refers to morphological and behavior changes that are biologically determined.
• Learning: It refers to changes in a person’s behavior produced as a result of practice and acquisition of a technique.
• Development: It would be the highest concept, the one covering the previous ones. It refers to quantitative and qualitative behavior changes that integrate psychical and biological structures with skills an individual learns overtime.

Critical or sensitive periods occur during a person’s development. These are moments where there is a special predisposition to learning certain things. Early attention is very important during childhood to palliate and remedy possible recoverable deficiencies. This is possible thanks to the child’s nervous system plasticity.

1.1. Factors that explain change

Three main factors explain psychological change.

They are related in the following way:

 

• Inheritance versus environment

• Continuity versus discontinuity

• Rules versus ideography

 

There is not a definite agreement on the level of implication these factors have in development, nor which factor plays a bigger role on a subject’s development. However, it is true that each of them somehow influences human development.

 

 

• Inheritance versus environment

 

Since antiquity, there is controversy over what is the reason for change: inheritance or environment. To a certain point, this is a futile debate, since both play a role in change.

Innatists defended biology as a fundamental factor for change in individuals. Information found in the genetic code passes down from parents to children, and therefore inheritance plays a fundamental role. Inherited information exists since birth for them. This information “starts up” as the “maturation calendar” progresses, and this is the only reason for subjects to change.

On the contrary, environmentalists thought just the opposite.  The reason for change—and therefore development—is the environment’s influence. The child evolves because of his/her relationship with the vital context in which he/she develops. Influences such as family, school, culture, friend, etc and each person’s vital circumstances modify radically their own development.

 

• Continuity versus discontinuity

 

Another factor largely discussed through history is continuity vs. discontinuity.

Champions of continuous development consider development harmonic and stable. Therefore, change is quantitative. This model is mainly defended by environmentalists.

Change for those working from discontinuous perspectives is understood as something sudden, sometimes unpredictable. Changes take place in “leaps.” Changes are qualitative and often are significant. Proponents of this model usually are innatist authors.

 

• Rules versus ideography

 

Authors proposing change as a rule consider change universal. It happens within all children in the world, regardless of culture or environment. These changes are usually related to biologic development aspects, and therefore are inherited. Proponents of ideography believe that each “subject is a world” of own experiences determined by his/her environment. In this case, change is individual and encouraged by context, although there can also be internal influences from the individual.

 

1.2. Context of development

The context in which the subject develops influences his/her own development. This is why different types of context may have an impact—and this is actually the case—on the way humans evolve. There are several kinds of contexts, but only four are the most significant ones: historic, cultural, socio-economic and ethnic contexts.

 

 

References

BERGER, K.S. (2004) Chapter 2. Theories of Development. p. 35-56 from BERGER, K.S. (2004) Psicología del desarrollo: infancia y adolescencia. Madrid: Médica-Panamericana