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The Wiley Handbook of Developmental Psychology in Practice:
Implementation and Impact, First Edition. Edited by Kevin Durkin
and H. Rudolph Schaffer. © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Published 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
On Giving Away Developmental Psychology
Kevin Durkin and H. Rudolph Schaffer
1
The book you have just opened deals with thousands of billions
of dollars – and much more.
If you are a taxpayer (or aspire to become a taxpayer), or a
parent (or plan to become a parent), some of those dollars, euros
or pounds will be yours. It costs a lot to raise children, to
provide the care and services that they will need on the long
journey to adulthood; these costs are met by families, public
services, and charities. If you are a practitioner in a field
related to human development and well‐being, or a policymaker
engaged in decisions about the distribution of resources across
services, you will be aware that the costs borne by the broader
community are enormous – so much so that we often do not have
enough to address all needs.
And the costs multiply when things go wrong. Consider the
economic costs:
• when children are exposed to abusive, discordant or
inadequate family contexts (Cicchetti et al., Chapter 15;
Cummings et al., Chapter 3; Dishion and Yasui,
Chapter 17; Moreland and Dumas, Chapter 4; Sanders and
Calam, Chapter 5);
• when millions of children receive poor child care (Hardway
and McCartney, Chapter 7); or their parents encounter
inadequate advice (Leach, Chapter 2);
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4 Kevin Durkin and H. Rudolph Schaffer
• when educational services consign whole generations to
methods of reading instruction that fly in the face of research
evidence (Johnston and Watson, Chapter 9), fail to exploit
the benefits of research‐based innovations in mathematical
education (Ginsburg and Ertle, Chapter 10) or fail to detect
hidden disabilities that impact on learning yet are at least
amenable to therapy (Conti‐Ramsden and Durkin,
Chapter 16);
• when children are victims of bullying (Smith, Chapter
12), avoidable acci-dents (Thomson, Chapter 13), or
prejudice (Cameron & Rutland, Chapter 14, Patterson & Farr,
Chapter 6);
• when societies fail to provide adequate help to children and
young people with, or at risk of, mental health problems (Cooper
and Knitzer, Chapter 18);
• when adolescents veer into antisocial behavior and high risk
taking (Dishion and Yashui, Chapter 17);
• when teenagers become pregnant (Martin and Brooks‐Gunn,
Chapter 8);• when young people enter society with poor
understanding of their rights,
responsibilities and opportunities as citizens (Helwig &
Yang, Chapter 11).
As several of the contributors point out, the profoundly
difficult topics with which they are dealing are associated with
enormous, ongoing material costs to nations worldwide. The best
available (most rigorously computed) estimates tend to be for the
leading industrialized nations, but readers from other countries
will be able to see the broad implications for their own economies.
When things go wrong in child development, or in families, or as
young people meet institutional or soci-etal problems, or when
children’s potential is neglected or thwarted, there are immediate
costs to the individuals and social structures involved, followed
by financial repercussions that can extend over decades.
Importantly, the biggest costs are likely to be incurred when we
do little or nothing to address the issues, problems and needs
(Aboud & Yousafzai, 2015; Scott, Knapp, Henderson, &
Maughan, 2001). The economics of intervention are complex and vary
across contexts (including whether they are preventive or remedial)
and time frames; this is not our primary concern here but it is
relevant to bear in mind that interventions to support healthy
development have been reported to show benefit‐to‐cost ratios
ranging from 3:1 to 18:1 (Engle et al., 2011; Hardway &
McCartney, Chapter 7, this volume; Heckman, 2006; Reynolds,
Temple, White, Ou,& Robertson, 2011). Intervention does cost –
but it also returns. Furthermore, provided that the benefits are
demonstrable in high quality research, this is an equation that
resonates with policymakers and the layperson (Moreland &
Dumas, Chapter 4, this volume).
Readers will already have considered that, of course, in each of
the above contexts there are other costs: the psychological costs
of stress and suffering. It is sobering to reflect, as we progress
through the authoritative reviews in the chapters ahead, that we
are not surprised to learn that so many children face circumstances
and events
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Giving Developmental Psychology Away 5
that are, literally, terrifying. Children suffer maltreatment
and abuse at home. The caregivers that children depend upon may be
in the throes of marital conflict that affects the whole household.
In the playground or park, many children are victim-ized. Many face
ethnic prejudice in their schools or communities. Some will enter
gangs by their early teens, and some of these are soon on their way
to prisons. Early sexual activities can lead to premature
parenthood, with radical impact on individ-uals’ circumstances and
prospects. Still more tragically, the privations and cruelties that
life can inflict are not distributed evenly; many young people are
exposed to combinations or accumulations of these adversities. Our
contributors speak to these concerns and, for many of the present
authors, the alleviation of unhappiness and suffering is a key
motivation for advancing applied developmental psychology.
Another dimension of costs, interrelated with the above, is the
impact of devel-opmental problems on the quality of society. As
well as the economic liabilities of less‐than‐optimal literacy and
numeracy education, these skills impact in countless ways on the
conduct of everyday life. As well as the psychological detriment to
direct victims of abuse or antisocial behavior, there are indirect
costs to many more in terms of the ways we perceive and experience
our communities. It is hard to quantify the economic costs of poor
moral reasoning abilities or deficient civics education, but
suppose a substantial sector of the population reaches adulthood
with no conception of their own or others’ rights. As Helwig and
Yang (Chapter 11) draw to our attention, the consequences for
society of shortcomings in moral understanding, grasp of the
principles of justice, democratic processes, and the rights and
duties of democratic citizenship are profound. Yet we still
struggle with (or, in some societies, ignore completely) how this
vital area of education can best be conducted. Their chapter
demonstrates how applied developmental research has the potential
to provide theoretically‐based yet practical routes to stimulating
advances in moral and civic education – but also that it is
confronted by many real‐world obstacles.
In the face of the diverse costs of the many potential problems
besetting human development, it follows that we should be asking
how developmental science can help us to address them. Answering
this question is the central purpose of this Handbook. Accordingly,
the volume sets out to describe and analyze what happens when
researchers offer the fruits of their studies to potential
recipients – be they professional workers in the field, local or
national organizations, parents or the general public. Its aims are
to examine the process of knowledge transfer and imple-mentation,
in order to investigate both the opportunities and obstacles
involved and to consider the factors that lead to successes and
disappointments. To this end we draw on the experience of a range
of academics representing a variety of topics in developmental
psychology with definite implications for practice, all of whom are
willing to share the experiences they encountered when confronting
the “giving away” process as part of their work.
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6 Kevin Durkin and H. Rudolph Schaffer
Can we Give Away Developmental Psychology?
There is widespread awareness these days that developmental
research is producing a considerable body of knowledge that is not
only theoretically significant but is potentially useful in the
real world. It follows that the outcomes of research studies ought,
therefore, to be passed on to practitioners and policymakers, and
many publications now include a section on the implications the
findings obtained have for intervention. Nevertheless, the impact
of research‐based knowledge on practice has been patchy – notably
successful in some areas, leading to significant advances in the
well‐being of children and their families, yet in other areas there
is still a considerable gap between research and its
application.
Clearly, the giving away process is not a straightforward one;
in particular, one needs to question the still prevailing
assumption among many people that it is a simple unidirectional
matter of knowledgeable researchers communicating their findings to
ignorant practitioners willing to abandon previous practices and
adopt new ideas. Publicizing research results and pointing out
their implications is only part of the story; their implementation
is another; and it is the latter that is now in need of close
attention.
Developmental psychologists are engaged in pursuing two aims.
One is to add further to the body of knowledge we have accumulated
so far about psychological development, in order to determine the
processes responsible for change over age and formulate the
theoretical principles which would help us to understand how and
why development occurs. This is generally referred to as basic
research, in that it is theory driven, is mostly conducted with
traditional scientific methodology and constitutes understanding
for the sake of understanding. The second aim is a practical one,
namely to help chil-dren avoid or at least overcome the hazards of
life, to make the most of their capacities and to attain optimal
competence in social and cognitive spheres. Such applied research
includes both prevention and intervention efforts; it takes place
in real‐life locations and sets out to solve society’s problems as
they impinge on children and their families.
These two aims – understanding and helping – have been somewhat
uneasy bedfellows over the years. Various questions arise: Are the
two compatible, in that both can be regarded as part of the same
discipline? Moreover, can any one individual researcher effectively
pursue both aims, even within the same investiga-tion? Is one more
“respectable” than the other? Do they require different skills and,
therefore, different training courses? Can basic research benefit
from the lessons learned by applied work, as much as vice versa?
Developmental psychologists have taken different views as to how
the tension between the two aims can be resolved, and there have
indeed been “fashions” in the answer provided. Thus, even in the
relatively short history of developmental psychology one can
roughly distinguish three periods, in each of which a particular
attitude prevailed.
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Giving Developmental Psychology Away 7
Historical Shifts in Giving Away
The first period covers the beginnings of the scientific study
of child development in the last two decades of the nineteenth
century and the first four or five decades of the next century,
when the simultaneous pursuit of both aims was not regarded as in
any way problematic and, indeed, the initial motivation to learn
about chil-dren arose from applied concerns. As Sears put it,
“Child development was formed by external pressures broadly based
on desires to better the health, the rearing, the education, and
the legal and occupational treatment of children…The field grew out
of relevance” (Sears, 1975, p. 4). When the first formal research
center in North America was set up in 1919 it was named the Iowa
Child Welfare Station, and given the brief of conducting research
directed at all problems of children’s development and welfare.
And, for that matter, the early fathers and mothers of child
psychology almost without exception conducted research motivated by
a mixture of basic and applied goals. G. Stanley Hall, for example,
was convinced that child psychology research is capable of
providing crucial guidance to those engaged in educational
practice; John B. Watson applied his behavioristic princi-ples to
the rearing of children and publicized his ideas in the form of
popular articles and books addressed to parents; and Gesell, a
student of Hall, intended his charts of psychological norms not
just to add to our scientific knowledge of children’s development
but also to act as a guide to parents in avoiding unrealistic
expectations as well as helping pediatricians to distinguish
normality from pathology. The spirit of the times was well
summarized by Charlotte Bühler (1935), when at the very beginning
of the Introduction to her textbook From Birth to Maturity, she
stated:
The development of modern child psychology in the last 10 to 20
years, through its scientific study of the child in all its life
situations, enables us today not only to present a very complete
scientific picture of mental development but also to solve many of
the practical problems which children present. Psychology can now
give us information and advice in regard to those practical
problems that confront parents and teachers in the understanding,
upbringing and education of children. It can in addition assist us
in meeting such community problems as the care, placement and
treatment of orphans, children of the poor, feeble‐minded,
delinquent, adopted and foster children.
Overoptimistic, perhaps, yet the view expressed in this
quotation reflects the predominant belief in those early decades in
the history of child psychology, that there is no incompatibility
between the motives to understand and to help, either for the
discipline as a whole which can, indeed should, pursue both, or
for
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8 Kevin Durkin and H. Rudolph Schaffer
individual academics who need not align themselves with one or
the other approach. A general assumption prevailed that scientific
knowledge is bound to lead to practical advances, and accordingly
psychologists saw it as their task to employ their knowledge for
social reform. What was not recognized at that time, however, was
that merely publicizing that knowledge was not in itself sufficient
to bring about change; the intricate connections between research
and practice that now preoccupy many developmental psychologists
were not yet recognized.
In the 1940s and 1950s a very different view began to emerge.
Psychology, it was concluded, had to demonstrate that it was a
“real” science, and pursuing applied research can only compromise
its aspirations to respectability. As a result, primarily under the
influence of learning theory, the use of controlled
experimentation, gen-erally under laboratory conditions away from
the messiness of the real world, became the primary way of building
up the body of theoretical principals required to account for the
nature of child behavior. Motivation for research was generally
provided by theory‐inspired questions rather than by applied
concerns, for it was not considered part of the job descriptions of
academics to solve the problems of society. Take the views of Wayne
Dennis, as reported by Milton Senn (1975) in the course of a
discussion with him:
There is certainly nothing of the reformer in me at all, except
that I hope the truth has some good effects. I am more interested
in finding out what a child is actually like. I am not trying to
change them. I hope that whatever child psychology as a scientific
study discovers will be useful, but that is to be determined later
and not before you start your investigation. (Senn, 1975, p.
64)
In fact, Dennis’s studies of institutionalized infants, carried
out in the 1940s and 1950s and summarized in his book Children of
the Crèche (Dennis, 1973), were extremely influential in improving
the conditions of orphanages and in preventing or at least
reversing the ill‐effects of deprivation. However, to bring about
such changes was not Dennis’s motive in setting out on his
investigations, and it was left to others with a more applied
orientation to make practical use of the data he had supplied. A
sharp divide thus appeared between basic and applied interests, in
that the two were widely regarded as quite separate enterprises.
Professional advance-ment in universities depended largely on
contributing to basic research, and little attempt was made by
academics to build bridges with practitioners and learn about their
concerns, let alone to provide solutions. The introduction of
rigorous meth-odology and pursuit of theoretically motivated
questions was, of course, of great importance, but the price paid
was a view of psychology among practitioners and the general public
as an arid subject that only incidentally had anything to offer
them in their struggles with everyday life.
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Giving Developmental Psychology Away 9
Fortunately this phase did not last long, and from the 1960s and
1970s onwards the pendulum began to swing back once more to a view
of child psychology as an enterprise that could be used for
practical as well as theoretical purposes. The event that heralded
this change is generally considered to be George Miller’s
presidential address to the American Psychological Association in
1969, in which he made a passionate plea to the members of his
profession to “give psychology away”. Rarely can a three‐word
phrase have had as much impact and been quoted so often since. A
few more words of Miller’s also repay careful attention:
I can imagine nothing we could do that would be more relevant to
human welfare, and nothing that could pose a greater challenge to
the next generation of psycholo-gists, than to discover how best to
give psychology away…Psychological facts should be passed out
freely to all who need and can use them…[Thus] our scientific
results will have to be instilled in the public consciousness in a
practical and usable form so that what we know can be applied to
ordinary people. (Miller, 1969, p. 1074)
And yet, as Miller wisely warned:
I am keenly aware that giving psychology will be no simple task.
In our society there are depths of resistance to psychological
innovations that have to be experienced to be believed…Many who
have tried to introduce sound psychological practice into school,
clinics, hospitals, prisons or industries have been forced to
retreat in dismay. They complain, and with good reason, that they
have been unable to buck the “System”, and often their reactions
are more violent than sensible. The System, they say, refuses to
change even when it does not work. (Miller, 1969, p. 1071)
Why the change back to a belief in the legitimacy of psychology
as a science with applied interests? Two sets of influences can be
singled out, one arising from within psychology itself and marked
by the demise of learning theory. The reductionist philosophy on
which the theory was based had served its somewhat limited purpose
and was increasingly seen as arid; conceptualizing psychological
phenomena in mental as well as in behavioral terms became
increasingly accept-able once more; and the emerging attention paid
to the context in which human beings functioned as a determinant
meant that researchers began to abandon the laboratory as the only
setting for their studies and once again collected their data in
the hurly burly of the real world. The other set of influences came
from changes taking place in society. In the latter part of the
twentieth century in particular, the conditions under which many
children were being brought up began to arouse increasing concern.
Phenomena such as the rise in the rate of divorce and single
parenthood, the realization that even in the wealthiest countries a
large number of children are living in poverty, the growing
disquiet felt about child abuse, the
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10 Kevin Durkin and H. Rudolph Schaffer
prevalence of addiction, antisocial behavior and mental
ill‐health among the young, and the worry that technological
innovations such as television and computers may have adverse as
well as beneficial effects – all these resulted in society turning
once more to psychologists and bringing pressure on them to come up
with explanations and solutions.
The psychological profession has by and large responded
positively to this challenge. There were, it is true, some initial
misgivings as to the effects that becoming increasingly involved in
applied issues would have on the scientific status of the
discipline (Morrison, Lord, & Keating, 1984), but as Cairns has
pointed out, this has not occurred – “on the contrary, carefully
evaluated social applications have helped create a more robust,
verifiable and relevant science” (Cairns, 1998, p. 92). The result
is that Applied Developmental Psychology (or Applied Developmental
Science, as it has come to be known in order to include the
contributions of other sciences such as biology, education,
economics and sociology) is now a respected and rapidly growing
field, especially in the United States, with its own journals,
associations and training courses, “that seeks to significantly
advance the integration of developmental science with actions that
address … pressing human problems” (Lerner, Fisher, & Weinberg,
2000, p. 11).
In short, we have reached the position where, as Lerner (2012)
argues persua-sively, the notion of a separation of “pure” and
“applied” is anachronistic within developmental science. In the
course of a single research study or program it is possible both to
contribute to basic theory and to help in solving applied problems
(Schwebel, Plumert, & Pick, 2000). Furthermore, if we are to
generate and test meaningful theories, our work has to be “embedded
in the actual ecology of human development in order to have
generalizability to the lived experiences of individuals and as
such … constitute intervention (applied) research and, at the same
time, research testing basic explanatory processes of human
development” (Lerner, 2012, p. 32, emphasis added). In a similar
spirit, Cicchetti et al. (Chapter 15, this volume) point out
that: “The ultimate goal of science is to benefit from the
generation of a knowledge base.”
Our knowledge of our participants, their progress and problems,
would be truly impoverished (and nonscientific) if we did not take
account of where they live, what they do, and how they respond to
their experiences. Offering numerous examples of Lerner’s “both at
the same time” maxim, every chapter in this collec-tion draws on
basic research and every chapter reviews findings that speak to the
theories, models and interests of basic researchers, while locating
their enquiries very much in the realities of people’s lives. The
work assembled here aspires towards the goal Lerner recommends for
the future of our discipline, namely that the emphasis is on
“rigorous, theory‐predicated research about the mutually
influential relations among individual and ecological processes,
about the embodiment of
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Giving Developmental Psychology Away 11
human development within the rich and complex ecology of human
life, [that] will continue to be at the forefront of developmental
science” (Lerner, 2012, p. 33).
Implications and Implementation
There is no doubt that the gap between theory and application is
becoming less wide than it was at one time. This is seen, for
example, in the forging of a working relation-ship in many areas
between psychological science and public policy, thanks largely to
the inspiring example set by certain individuals, such as Edward
Zigler (Aber, Bishop‐Josef, Jones, McLearn, & Phillips, 2007).
It is also found in the establishment of training courses for the
application of developmental research, open not only to
devel-opmental scientists but also to those from a policy and
practice background, thus providing an opportunity to learn a
common language, share problems and acquire similar sets of
methodological tools to tackle these problems (Lerner, Jacobs,
& Wertlieb, 2005). And it is also seen in the many reports of
basic research that now have a concluding section on the
implications of their findings for practice.
Highlighting the practical implications of a scientific study is
a valuable, indeed essential aspect of the research‐to‐action
process, but it is by no means the end of the story. Implication
needs to be followed by implementation, that is, ensuring that
potentially useful findings are in fact used. To disseminate
research results among the relevant policy and practitioner groups,
even if the right outlets and the appropriate language are used,
does not in itself guarantee action. There are still academics who
assume that if one can demonstrate by means of objective research
that A is better than B at a statistically significant level of
0.05 or better, the power of such evidence will by itself persuade
everyone concerned to drop course B and adopt A instead. That,
alas, is a naive attitude; there are many reasons for taking or not
taking decisions other than knowledge alone.
Let us emphasize that by no means everything that psychological
research has to offer encounters such problems. As Phillip Zimbardo
(2004) in his presidential address to the American Psychological
Association – 35 years after that given by Miller – pointed out,
there are many research findings which have been readily accepted
by the public and are now so pervasive that they are generally
taken for granted: work on psychological testing, positive
reinforcement, prejudice and discrimination, psychological stress
and many other topics has widely been recog-nized as of great
potential value in fostering human welfare. At the same time, and
often at a personal as well as an official level, numerous creative
working relationships have been established between academics on
the one hand and policymakers and practitioners on the other,
ensuring that evidence based findings result in interventions
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12 Kevin Durkin and H. Rudolph Schaffer
to the benefit of clients in need. And yet, as the contributors
to this volume make clear, there are numerous other areas where
this does not apply, where certain factors operate in creating
obstacles to spanning the research–practice gap. Clearly these
factors need to be identified and, given the move from a
unidirectional to a bidirec-tional view, respected in the
transmission process. This is perhaps the most important task now
confronting anyone working on the giving away of psychology.
About this Book
While every aspect covered by developmental psychology has the
potential to be exploited for its use in applied settings, in some
such exploitation has gone much further. It is from these that we
have chosen certain topics, the choice depending, in part, on just
how active the effort has been in transferring research findings to
practitioners and, in part, on the wish to cover a wide diversity
of areas in order to examine the extent to which they share both
the problems confronting anyone engaged in knowledge transfer and
the conclusions to be drawn from efforts to solve them. There are
no doubt many other topics we could have selected, but those
included here do serve as examples of the efforts that have been
made on the part of a growing number of workers in applying a
research orientation to real‐world problems. Inevitably, many
chapters address themselves to aspects of dysfunction and atypical
development, but it is in these areas that there is the greatest
need for informed policy and action and that have consequently
attracted most attention from applied psychologists.
The chapters chosen are grouped in three sections, entitled
Family Processes and Child Rearing Practices, Educational Aspects,
and Clinical Aspects. These group-ings are not rigid or impermeable
and readers will encounter many areas of overlap across sections
and chapters.
The authors are all eminent researchers whose studies have
definite implications for practice and who have confronted the
giving away process as part of their work. We asked contributors,
where appropriate, to follow a particular structure when writing
their chapters. In each case, there is a conventional component,
namely setting out the scene by presenting a succinct overview of
the relevant research. Then, we asked authors to reflect on how
they had experienced the giving away process, what they had learned
from it and what they would wish to share with potential future
researchers and practitioners in their field of expertise. This
could include accounts of the actual implementation of the research
and its reception by the relevant individuals and institutions in
the field, and the myriad factors bearing on the course of their
programs, including interactions with policymakers and other
external influences.
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Giving Developmental Psychology Away 13
With respect to their own areas of specialism, each chapter
tells its own story. Rather than reiterate their thoughtful
expositions here, we will attempt instead to preview some of the
recurrent and generic themes concerning the giving away process.
Some of these are obvious areas that researchers will have to
grapple with if they work in the real world, and some may be less
obvious; yet, crucially, most of them receive far less attention in
the scientific literature than they warrant. They bear very
directly on our work and the processes of implementing and
translating research – but they are not often taught, and many
researchers learn about them the hard way. They con-cern working
with policy makers, working with external institutions and
agencies, working with the media, and reflections on the history of
research programs.
Working with policymakers
When research is addressed to questions concerning how children
should be raised, how families can be supported, how we can help
those with difficulties, how educational systems can be improved,
it is very likely to intersect with the interests of policymak-ers.
Many of the chapters in this collection report aspects of such
intersections.
As Hardway and McCartney discuss, in most areas of human
development some kind of policy is inevitable and some kind of
research is likely: it would be good to bring them together but,
for reasons they elaborate, this is often not achieved. Cooper and
Knitzer, addressing related issues, remind us that public policy is
a blunt tool, fashioned in contexts that meet some needs and fail
to tackle others. Furthermore, policy can change (and sometimes for
the better) as research gathers momentum and publicity. Smith, for
example, describes how bullying was once an area of policy vacuum
yet, in a relatively short space of time, became the focus of
mandatory policy that affected every school in his country.
Several of the chapters ahead also describe encountering
indifference, resistance and political pressures. While many of the
contributors can point to areas where public policies have been
helpful, none is able to enter a “Completely satisfactory” report.
This is not because policymakers are bad people: they work in very
different systems with very different agendas. An important part of
the giving away process is learning to communicate in ways that are
meaningful to them.
Other institutions: Schools, child care centers, community
agencies and the legal system
As has become increasingly apparent, and as will be amplified in
several chapters here, giving away research is not a unidirectional
process (McCall & Groark, 2000), where knowledgeable
researchers hand over their conclusions to ignorant
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14 Kevin Durkin and H. Rudolph Schaffer
practitioners and grateful policymakers only too willing to
adopt the new ideas. Any potential consumer of research is not a
tabula rasa, but is influenced by many considerations other than
knowledge alone, such as political and ideolog-ical factors,
financial constraints, perceived threat to professional role,
emotional resistance, sheer inertia and a range of other obstacles
to change.
Much applied developmental research has implications for the
institutions in which children spend much of their time, such as
schools and child care centers, or other community‐based agencies
that deliver services to families and children (Cooper and
Knitzer). Often, and especially in the wake of broader economic
crises, these bodies are working in the context of financial
stringencies that bear on how adequately they can meet their
primary purposes (Cicchetti et al.). To gain access to these
institutions to run research programs and interventions, and to
collaborate with the staff, usually entails seeking approval from
educational authorities, directors, principals, and head teachers.
This may involve careful and sometimes protracted negotiations with
senior administrators who may have many other calls on their time
and resources. Cicchetti, Ginsberg and Ertle, and Moreland and
Dumas, in their respective chapters, describe important practical
issues that can arise when working with the directors of child care
centers and agencies, even when the directors are very enthusiastic
about the project.
The staff in these workplaces (including teachers, assistants,
educational psychologists, and other therapists) are generally
highly motivated, skilled and experienced professionals who are
very committed to the well‐being and advance-ment of the children
in their care. They are also extremely busy and, in most
educational systems, subject to a lot of pressure from
policymakers, their own management, parents, and other sources.
Their work is highly accountable and they are required to tick
(literally) a lot of boxes, often on a daily basis. Thus, when it
comes to implementing and testing the fruits of rigorous
developmental research in the classroom, what seems like a good
plan from the perspective of a research institution may be
confronted with the rude reality that teachers some-times have
competing priorities and, occasionally, strong reasons not to want
to do what the researcher believes would be a good thing to do.
Even incontrovert-ibly desirable activities, such as teachers
providing a series of practical training sessions to instruct
5–7‐year‐olds how to manage traffic hazards in the street, may be
too much to add to teachers’ already high workloads (Thomson).
Ginsburg and Ertle provide a frank and very revealing description
of the issues facing teachers – and, hence, their own applied
developmental work with them – in the process of giving away a rich
and creative, research‐based mathematics curric-ulum for 4‐ and
5‐year old children, in predominantly low‐income schools and
childcare centers in New York City and New Jersey. This project
also enjoyed the full support of district level officials.
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Giving Developmental Psychology Away 15
Any project with a longitudinal dimension will face challenges
in recruiting and retaining participants; these challenges are
likely to be still greater when the sample of interest has high
levels of social disadvantage or stress. Moreland and Dumas offer
very practical guidance on how to address these challenges.
The legal system is another important environment in which
applied develop-mental psychology interacts with the structures,
assumptions and processes of the larger society. Child and
adolescent offenders have been a longstanding focus of applied
developmental research (Dishion and Yasui). Indeed, children’s
involve-ment with the law – as the subjects of custody decisions,
as victims and witnesses – has been one of the most active areas of
applied developmental research and implementation over the last few
decades (Cashmore & Bussey, 1996; Ceci, Markle, & Chae,
2005; Patterson & Farr, Chapter 6, this volume; Saywitz,
1989; Zajac, O’Neill, & Hayne, 2012).
The legal system has to make decisions about the well‐being of
young people, often in very complex and fraught circumstances
(Schaffer, 1998). Frequently, the system is ready, even keen, to
draw on the evidence base provided by developmental researchers
(Cicchetti et al., Patterson and Farr). As Patterson and Farr
illustrate, there are direct ways in which developmental psychology
enters into and influences legal decision making (including formal
citation of research findings and consulta-tion of expert
witnesses), as well as indirect ways, such as the dissemination of
ideas through the mass media, which in turn may form part of the
backdrop of assump-tions of lawyers and judges. These authors show,
in an account of the evolving of the American legal system in
relation to parenting by gay and lesbian people, that the impact of
developmental research can be difficult to predict. Successful
legal actions, such as litigation by victims of bullying (Smith),
can impact greatly on policymakers’ sensitivity to issues.
Delivery of any successful service in any human workplace
depends on the quality, skills and motivation of the relevant staff
and their managers. This is very much the case in respect of the
kinds of projects undertaken by applied developmentalists. Training
staff appropriately and thoroughly is essential and several
chapters discuss the practicalities involved in their particular
sphere of interest (for example, Cicchetti et al. on the selection
and training of staff in family centers). As Cummings et al.
report, one further constraint – very salient to most researchers –
that bears on the training of research and intervention personnel
is that sources of funding are usually fluctuating, subject to gaps
or disappearance. This is not unique to our employment sector but,
as in others, it can mean that investment in the right people can
be put under pressure as they are compelled for their own economic
security to seek more stable sources of income. Interestingly, in
some contexts, volunteers can be recruited to, and trained for,
applied research projects with positive results (see Thomson on
volunteer trainers working to improve child pedestrian safety).
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16 Kevin Durkin and H. Rudolph Schaffer
Sensitivity is needed when offering practitioners new ways of
doing things. As authors report, whether it be promoting child
pedestrian safety (Thomson) or teaching mathematics (Ginsburg and
Ertle), some will be alert to the possibility of implied criticism
of their current practices, and this has the potential to create a
barrier to the researcher’s message. Indeed, professional
self‐preservation in the face of divergent and sometimes
conflicting advice can lead to teachers sometimes adopting eclectic
approaches to pre‐empt possible criticism of oversight or neglect
(Johnson and Watson).
The media
The media are relatively neglected in developmental research
(Durkin & Blades, 2009). Even research into the most popular
topic in this area, effects of media vio-lence, is more often
conducted by social psychologists than developmentalists. Yet most
applied developmentalists will come into contact with the media at
some stage – reactively and/or proactively – and it is striking how
often the topic comes up (unprompted!) in the chapters that
follow.
The topics on which we work relate to the well‐being of
developing people, equity and support. Specific research projects
or findings will attract the attention of journalists. In many
cases, this can be an innocuous process (e.g., the press report the
launch of a newly funded project, perhaps basing the story very
closely on the research institution’s press release) or even
beneficial (e.g., media publicity helps with participant
recruitment or access to other organizations). Smith discusses how
media coverage raised public awareness of the problems of school
bullying, leading to action from policymakers, more funding for
research and more investment in effective school procedures.
Cameron and Rutland describe how very strong working relationships
with practitioners were triggered by researchers’ appearances in
the media. Sometimes, experienced researchers will initiate such
coverage delib-erately and often media outlets are willing to
assist because they see the human interest of the research.
Several chapters report on uses of media may as part of the
research and/or inter-vention process (for example, Smith, on the
provision of help packs and telephone helplines to address school
bullying). In some cases, information relayed via media may be the
most readily available, or even the only, option for reaching
families which are unable or unwilling to participate in
face‐to‐face, on‐site sessions (for example, Cummings et al.,
Sanders and Calam).
Media may be exploited also for translational purposes, to
communicate with, inform and coordinate key stakeholders (Thomson).
Conti‐Ramsden and Durkin describe the ways in which researchers and
practitioners are using the Internet to
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Giving Developmental Psychology Away 17
promote public and professional awareness of an often hidden
childhood disability (language impairment) and to make research
findings accessible to affected individ-uals, their families and
others. Hardway and McCartney emphasize the need for researchers to
work effectively with the media to communicate our messages to
policymakers. Researchers and policymakers, they point out, have
much to learn from each other but operate within very different
constraints, a reality that makes communication much more difficult
that it might at first appear.
Sanders and Calam provide an extensive account of the potential
role of media in teaching parenting skills, particularly in
connection with the Triple P Program. They offer a conceptual
framework for how the media can be used and, drawing on their own
considerable experience, discuss the many concerns that researchers
and practitioners may have about working with and via media. Again,
their strategies and findings will be of benefit to colleagues in
other areas of applied developmental psychology who are planning to
include media components in intervention or translational work.
Working with the media can be precarious. Well‐being is, by
definition, desir-able but many people do not have it. To achieve
it may require changes to the status quo (for example, changes in
the distribution of resources or the provision of new services);
changes (or proposed changes) to the status quo are contentious, so
there is potential for adverse reactions within the media. These
may take the form of direct criticism of the project (e.g., a
hostile column or editorial) or an active search for opposition.
For example, one of us once held a research grant to investigate
aspects of children’s understanding of gender role stereotypes in
television. His uni-versity issued a short press release to
summarize the background and purposes of the work, which included
an interest in testing children’s reactions to counterste-reotyped
portrayals (male nurses, female plumbers, etc.). A local newspaper
responded with a column headed ‘Boys will be boys’, in which the
journalist explained that gender roles and behavior were given by
nature and he urged that public monies should not be wasted on
academic projects that did not recognize the irreversibility of
evolution’s achievements. It was scarcely a devastating critique,
and debate and challenge are to be welcomed (furthermore, the paper
accepted a rebuttal). But media objections do have the potential to
foster a climate in which a research venture is inconvenienced (for
example, inducing reluctance in schools to grant access to
potential participants, or attracting further critiques from
politicians who may not be sympathetic to change). Media
interventions are often attempted in contexts where there are
strong countervailing sociocultural assumptions and it cannot be
guaranteed that the messages delivered will be effective; some
critics will object that even covering the issue will furnish a
climate of complicity – see, for example, Martin and Brooks‐Gunn on
reactions to television programs intended to help deter teenage
pregnancy. Another pernicious example (potentially harmful to
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18 Kevin Durkin and H. Rudolph Schaffer
good teaching practice) can be seen in media reactions to
research on the effectiveness of synthetic phonics in reading
(Johnston and Watson).
A common journalistic strategy is to seek contrary opinions to
engender contro-versy. In a democratic society, this is a
reasonable process but it does mean that the terms of debate can
shift radically outside those that might be assumed within academic
contexts (which is not to attribute to the latter environment a
complete absence of emotions, biases, and competing interests!).
So, for example, a major research project, such as might be headed
by many of the contributors to this volume, can be pitted on
national radio against a vocal critic representing a pressure group
that subscribes to opposing goals and values. In some cases, the
critic may have legitimate credentials (professional expertise in
the domain of interest) and in some cases she or he may not.
This is not to assume that we (researchers) are right and the
media (or the opposing lobby group, politicians, or individuals)
are wrong. Nor should we expect that media outlets be staffed
exclusively by professionals who see things much as we do and wait
only for news from us that they can translate into empathetic
articles. The more important point is that research which engages
with the real world is likely to find itself dealing with the real
world, and this can be a delicate process in which it behoves
researchers to anticipate, where possible, and to deal with, where
necessary, ramifications of their work that go beyond the
parameters taken for granted in academic discourse. For better or
worse, this makes for a different con-text from running E‐prime
experiments testing undergraduates’ reactions to transient visual
stimuli – and, as shown in the work of many contributors to this
volume, it calls for a different mixture of skills.
Penelope Leach is well versed in dealing with the mass media. As
a leading practitioner in writing books and articles and presenting
television programs for parents, she has reached very large
audiences to present parenting advice based on psychological
research. In Chapter 2, she provides a rich historical
overview of the ways in which the developing science of
developmental psychology has both responded to prevailing
sociopolitical and cultural assumptions and impacted upon them.
Reflections on the history of programs
We also encouraged authors, where appropriate, to reflect on
historical develop-ments related to the subjects of their chapter.
This was not for the traditional reason of documenting the
development of the background literature. As above, historical
perspectives help us to see how ideas emerge (and fade) and
invariably remind us of how closely scientific developments are
tied to the sociocultural and ideological
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Giving Developmental Psychology Away 19
climates in which they unfold (Arnett & Cravens, 2006;
Leach, Chapter 2, this volume; Lerner, Fisher & Weinberg,
2000; Mülberger, 2014; Oppenheimer & Barrett, 2011). This is of
particular interest to the present collection in terms of what it
reveals about the conditions under which developmentalists attempt
to give the fruits of their specialisms away and the ways in which
they are received.
Smith, in summarizing the recent history of research and
practice relating to bullying, makes the thought‐provoking
observation that only a few decades ago there was scant interest in
bullying as a research topic. A similar point could be made about
research into parenting by gay and lesbian people (Patterson and
Farr). In the case of bullying, the prevailing assumption seems to
have been that it was part of life; in the case of gay parenting,
perhaps the assumption was that it was not part of life – in both
cases, these assumptions are now consigned to the dustbin of
history and applied developmental research has played an important
role in respond-ing to and facilitating changes in societal
perspectives. Cicchetti et al. describe how, through collaboration
with researchers and over the course of a decade, service providers
came to shift an initially resistant stance to the notion of random
assign-ment of participants in the course of evaluation. Thomson
shows how research helped practitioners come to terms with the fact
that there is much more to child pedestrian safety than telling
children to be careful when crossing the road.
In other contexts, historical perspectives reveal telling
contrasts between the refinement of intellectual activity in a
given field and the resistance of practice to any change at all.
Consider, for example, the exciting developments in moral
development theory over the last 30 or so years versus what is
observable in moral and civics education in many classrooms (Helwig
& Yang, Chapter 11, this volume). And history can
highlight the consequences of undirected eclecticism: Johnson and
Watson offer fascinating observations about the “archeology” of the
last few decades of teaching practice in reading in UK schools, in
which prevailing methods retain fossilized strands of earlier,
sometimes intuitive, approaches, now juxtaposed with – and,
unfortunately, potentially undermining – more recent evidence‐based
techniques.
There is another sense in which the history of research programs
is revealing. Good researchers are good learners, and good learners
profit from their errors and other feedback. Thwarted plans,
disappointments, serendipity, and obstacles tell us a lot, not only
about what works and does not work at the practical level but also
about where our theories and methods are in need of improvement.
Several con-tributors describe in valuable detail how their
progress and practices were reshaped in the light of discoveries
made in implementation in the “actual ecology of human
development.” These accounts, in turn, provide invaluable
guidelines to future applied researchers, as well as what Dishion
and Yasui show, in a very positive sense, is the reassuring
“comfort of failure” and the rewards of resilience.
0002604497.indd 19 11/21/2015 11:36:29 AM
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20 Kevin Durkin and H. Rudolph Schaffer
Conclusions
In sum, our contributors show that giving away developmental
psychology involves much more than is captured in the traditional
sections of a scientific report. Whether it be negotiating with
policymakers, collaborating with practitioners from very different
professional backgrounds, or communicating with or via the mass
media, there are many variables at play. These are not background
“noise” to the scientific project but the inevitable settings –
part of the ecology – in which research is applied and implemented.
Unless you are very fortunate, you do not get taught this stuff in
graduate school!
We hope, then, that this Handbook will be more than a
fascinating compilation of cutting edge research, eloquently
summarized by leading exponents. We hope that it will be useful.
Distinctively, it assembles the wisdom, experiences,
self‐reflections and, occasionally, warnings of a wide range of
experts who have grappled with the many challenges – and rewards –
of giving developmental psychology away. Future researchers, drawn
to these and other areas of developmental imple-mentations, will
profit from careful attention to the authoritative reports here of
what happens when developmental research is put in action.
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