THEORIES AND RESEARCH METHODS
THREE GENERAL QUESTIONS
1. What is the is the psychology of aging? The
psychology of aging is the scientific study of age-related change in behavior
and thought processes over the lifespan
2. What is important in development/aging -- or,
what develops/ages?
four dimensions: biological, cognitive,
social, and emotional processes
3. How do we understand development?
-
through science: an accumulation of facts held together
by theories
-
theory: an organized set of propositions used to
organize and explain data
-
theories generate hypotheses - predictions we can
test by gathering appropriate data
-
scientific method: use theory to identify a problem/prediction,
collect data, draw conclusions, revise theory
-
goals of science: 1) describe, 2) explain, 3) control:
improve, prevent, connect
THEORETICAL APPROACHES
Two types of developmental theories:
-
age-irrelevant — hypothesize that the same mechanisms
operate in much the same way throughout adulthood
-
age-relevant — hypothesize specific changes during
adulthood
AGE-IRRELEVANT THEORIES -
Behaviorism
Traditional Behaviorism —
Key concepts: classical and operant conditioning,
schedules of reinforcement
Example: an older adult decides to return
to school to earn a college degree
Cognitive/Social Learning Approach —
Key concepts: observational learning
and vicarious reinforcement, modeling
Example: Using the same example, a cognitive
behaviorist/social learning theorists would add additional thought processes
such as self-efficacy (one’s belief in one’s competence) or explanatory
style (the perspective we adopt for viewing nonreinforcing or reinforcing
events)
Freud’s Psychoanalytic Theory —
Key concepts: personality is made up
of three parts — the Id (instinctual urges), the Ego (rational, reality-oriented),
and the Superego (conscience) which were developed in childhood
Example: a recently widowed woman withdraws
from social contact
Behavioral-Genetics —
Key concepts: traits are inherited; heritability
— the degree to which variations in a trait can be attributed to genetic
influences; assessed through twin and/or adoption studies
Example: Swedish Twin/Adoption Study of
Aging — began in the early 1980’s with identical and fraternal twin pairs
who had been adopted before age 10; tested every three years and compared
with a non-adopted twin control group
Some findings: heritabilities vary with
some of the highest being for cognitive processes (R2 = .80),
but even within that "trait," there is variation; heritabilities seem to
be even higher for pathologies: Alzheimer’s and depression have heritabilities
as high as .70; heritabilities may change across the lifespan; the heritability
for physical health was lower in the older age group
Information Processing —
Key concepts: applicable primarily to
cognition; describes information processing as occurring through a series
of stages: sensory memory, short-term memory, and long term memory; often
compares the human mind as working like a computer (input, processing,
output)
Example: age differences in short term
memory processes
AGE-RELEVANT THEORIES -
Erik Erikson’s Psychosocial Crises —
Key concepts: a psychoanalytic approach
that suggests conflict between the person and the social environment; made
up of 8 stages from birth to death; generativity vs. stagnation (35 — 60
years) and ego integrity vs. despair (60 years on) are the conflicts of
adulthood
Example: a recently retired male contemplates
his future
Carl Jung’s Midlife Passage —
Key concepts: a psychoanalytic approach
emphasizing two stages of adulthood — youth (puberty to 35) and maturity
(45+), and a midlife shift (age 40)
Example: older males and females report
being more comfortable with non-stereotypical gender roles
Paul Baltes’ Selective Optimization with Compensation
—
Key concepts: abilities and preferences
change with age; successful living involves selecting among possible activities,
optimizing our success with those activities, and compensating for our
weaknesses in carrying out chosen activities
Example: choosing among potential retirement
activities
Contextualist, Lifespan Developmental —
Key concepts: adaptation and change are
multidirectional and multidimensional; they must be understood in context
(the setting in which development occurs) and culture (the behavioral patterns,
beliefs, etc., that are transmitted from one generation to another)
Example: each of the older adults described
above
RESEARCH METHODS
Three general types of studies which incorporate
age as a variable:
cross-sectional research - two or more
age groups tested at the same time
+ less expensive
+ relatively easy to do
- concern that effects are from cohort differences
rather than age differences (cohort = a group of people who have shared
a common experience, a generation)
- examines age differences only
longitudinal research - same people measured
at different points in time
+ can be used to examine age changes
- practice effects
- selective attrition (experimental mortality)
- changes in social climate (time-of-measurement
effect)
- expensive in both time and money
cross-sequential research - longitudinal
research with a cross-sectional component
+ can be used to study both age changes and cohort
differences
+ controls for practice effects
- complicated
- even more expensive than longitudinal research!
How do we collect data?
number of methods -- all of which have biases,
but at the same time, they attempt to use systematic observation
under controlled conditions
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field studies and naturalistic observation
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case studies
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surveys, interviews, and questionnaires
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standardized tests
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experiments
How do we evaluate the research?
Internal validity: Does the research really test
what it purports to test?
External validity: Are the results generalizable
beyond the specific group tested?
1) Be careful to avoid the correlation/causation
mistake:
-
Correlational research involves measuring the relationship
between two variables -- no causality can be inferred (e.g., the relationship
between diet and heart disease or sex and coffee consumption in older adults)
-
Experimental research involves manipulating and then
measuring the effect of one variable (the independent variable)
on another (the dependent variable) in order to make inferences
about causality
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Because it is impossible to manipulate and randomly
assign people to different age groups, age cannot be an explanatory variable
— it’s always correlational
2) Be careful to look at the sample:
-
volunteers may be (and have been found to be) systematically
different than randomly selected groups of research participants
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also, where participants are recruited may affect
the generalizability of the results
-
unfortunately, we don’t know a lot about minority
aging, aging in the old-old, or aging in lower-education groups because
most aging research has been conducted on white, middle class elderly
3) Be careful to look at the measures:
-
how are measures operationalized or conceptualized?
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do these definitions mean the same thing at different
ages?
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are the measures valid (true measures)?
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are the measures reliable (repeatable)?
We can have the greatest confidence about a set of
research results when a multimeasure, multimethod, multicontext approach
is used.