In human development, a developmental theory is an organized set of ideas that is designed to explain behavior and development. There are five general perspectives that influence current research on human development:
The Psychodynamic theory – Holds that development is largely determined by how well people resolve conflicts they face at different ages. In Psychosocial theory, Eric Ericson proposed that personality development is determined by the interaction of an internal maturation plan and external societal demands. It involves eight biologically fixed stages representing people at particular ages and each stage has challenges that must be met with a combination of these inner psychological influences and outer social influences. Once they are met successfully, people are well prepared to meet the challenge in the next stage. The sequence of stages in Ericson’s theory is based on the epigenetic principle, which means that each psychosocial strength has its own special period of particular importance. So it takes a lifetime to acquire all of the psychosocial strengths.
The Learning theory – The view of the learning theorists is that experiences propel people along their developmental journeys. Behaviorism is a learning theory. John Watson argued early in the 20th century that people were blank slates. BF Skinner did research studying operant conditioning in which the consequences of a behavior determined whether a behavior was repeated in the future. This consisted of reinforcements and punishments. In social learning theory, people learn much by simply watching those around them. This is known as imitational or observational learning. This is a very complex process that is more than sheer mimicry. People are not mechanically copying what they see and hear. Instead they look to others for information about appropriate behavior. When peers are reinforced for behaving in a particular way, this encourages imitation.
Cognitive theory – Albert Bandura’s social cognitive theory suggests that people actively try to understand what goes on in their world and because of reinforcement and punishment, what other people do is an important source of information about the world. He argues that experience gives people a sense of self-efficacy, which refers to peoples beliefs about their own abilities and talents. Due to self-efficacy, whether an individual imitates others depends on who the other person is, on whether that person’s behavior is rewarded and on the individuals beliefs about his or her own abilities. So Bandura’s social cognitive theory is a far cry from skinners operant conditioning. The operant conditioned person who responds mechanically to reinforcement and punishment has been replaced by the social cognitive person who actively interprets these and other events.
Lev Vygotsky was one of the first theorists to theorize that children’s thinking does not develop in a vacuum but is influenced by the Sociocultural context in which the children grow up. Children’s’ thinking becomes more sophisticated as they develop, so by helping children to understand themselves, their growth and the world, thus providing positive cultural transmission, children will respond with an optimum development.
Cognitive development theory focuses on thought processes and the construction of knowledge. The key is how people think and how thinking changes over time. There are two approaches:
The first approach postulates that thinking develops in a universal sequence of stages, the best known example of which is Pieget’s theory of cognitive development. Pieget believed that children naturally tried to make sense of their world. Youngsters want to understand the working of both the physical and the social world. In their efforts to understand their world, children act like scientists, creating theories about physical and social worlds. They try to weave all that they know into a complete theory which is tested daily by experience. Because their theories lead children to expect certain things to happen: when predicted events do occur the belief grows stronger and when they do not, the child must revise their theory. Piagets theory had enormous influence on how developmentalists and practioneers think about cognitive development. This theory is divided into four stages:
· Sensorymotor – just until they are two, when they develop their senses and motor skills and by the end use mental representation.
· Preoperational thought – until they are six, where they learn to use symbols. Such as words and numbers, but relate to the world only through one perspective.
· Concrete operational thought – occurs around 7 until adolescences where the child understands and applies logical operations to experiences, provided they are focused on the here and now.
· Formal operational thought – occurs beyond adolescences where abstract thought occurs and hypothetical situations and speculate on what may be possible.
The second approach suggests that people process information as computers do, just becoming more efficient over much of the lifespan. Information processing theory is an example of this view. Information processing theory proposes that human cognition consists of mental hardware and mental software. To explain developmental changes in thinking, they suggest thinking about improvements in personal computers and how the software and hardware has improved.
Ecological theory and systems
The ecological and systems approach focuses on the complexities of the environments and their links to development. In ecological theory, human development is inseparable from the environmental context in which a person develops. Urie Bronfenbrenner proposed that the developing person is embedded in a series of complex and interactive systems. He divided the environment into four levels:
· A microsystem –consists of people and objects in an individual’s immediate environment, i.e. parents and child
· The mesosystem –provides connections across Microsystems, because what happens in one microsystem is likely to influence another, i.e. school and friends
· The exosystem –refers to the social setting that a person may not experience firsthand but that still influences development, i.e. parents social network and coworkers
· Macrosystem –the broadest environmental context, the cultures and subcultures in which all other systems are embedded, i.e. historical events, culture and ethnic groups
Bronfenbrenner’s ecological theory emphasizes the many levels of influence on human development. People are affected directly by family and friends and indirectly by social systems, which in turn are affected by the beliefs and heritage of one’s culture.
According to the Competence Environmental press theory people adapt most effectively when there is a good match between their competence or abilities and the environmental press, or the demands put on them by the environment. The theory was originally proposed to account for the ways in which older adults function in their environment, but it applies as well throughout the lifespan. This theory also emphasizes that in order to understand people’s functioning, it is essential to understand the systems in which they live.
Ecological theory expands learning theory by insisting that the environment means much more than reinforcements, punishments and observations. Such a theorists would emphasize the different levels of environmental influence in the microsystem used to balance a home and work in the mesosystem skillfully to contribute to development as well as participation in a cultural group as an exosystem that emphasized the value of success.
Theories involving the Lifespan Perspective, Selective Optimization with Compensation and the Life-course perspective
As modern perspectives emphasize the importance of viewing human development as a lifelong process, the Lifespan Perspective Selective Optimization with Compensation and Life-course perspective ideas developed.
According to the lifespan perspective, human development is multiply determined and cannot be understood within the scope of a single framework. No single period of a person’s life can be understood apart from its origins and its consequences. How one’s life is played out is affected by social, environmental, and historical change, thus the experiences of one generation may not be the same as the experiences of another. A model that has influenced a wide range of research on adult development and aging suggests that human development is complex and cannot be understood from a single discipline. The lifespan perspective suggested by Baltes and his colleagues proposed that lifespan development consisted of a dynamic interplay between growth, maintenance and loss regulation. They identify four key features of the lifespan perspective:
· Multidirectionality – where development involves both growth and decline.
· Plasticity – where one’s capacity is not predetermined or carved in stone, but many skills can be learned or improved with practice.
· Historical context – where each of us develops within a particular set of circumstances determined by the historical time in which we are born and the culture in which we grew up.
· Multiple causation – how we develop results from biological, psychological, Sociocultural and life-cycle forces.
Taken together the principles of the lifespan perspective create a way to describe and explain the successful adaptation of people to the changes that occur with aging by proposing an interaction between three processes: Selection, compensation and optimization. The basic assumption of SOC is that the three processes form a system of behavioral action that generates and regulates development and aging. Selection occurs for two main reasons:
· Elective selection – occurs when one chooses to reduce one’s involvement to fewer domains as a result of new demands or tasks.
· Loss based selection – results when this reduced involvement happens as a result of anticipated losses in personal or environmental resources.
In either case, selection can involve continuation of previous goals on a lesser scale, or the substitution of new goals and it may be either proactive or reactive.
Compensation occurs when a person’s skills have decreased so they no longer function well in a particular domain, causing a search for an alternative way to accomplish the goal sometimes requiring learning a new skill. This differs from selection in the sense that the task, or goal, is maintained, although other means are used to achieve it.
And optimization involves minimizing losses and maximizing gains. The main idea is to find the best match possible between ones resources, biological, psychological, and Sociocultural, and one’s goals. Because people cannot achieve optimum outcomes in everything, development becomes a dynamic process of selecting the right goals and compensating when possible to help maximize the odds of achieving them.
The lifespan perspective and SOC model have provided important approaches to the contemporary study of human development. Finally, the Life-course perspective describes the ways in which the various generations experience the biological, psychological and sociocultural forces of development in their respective historical context. The key feature of the life-course perspective is the dynamic interplay between the individual and society. This interplay creates three major dimensions, which all involve timing and underlie the life-course perspective:
· The individual timing of life events in relation to historical external events
· The synchronization of individual transitions with collective familial ones
· The impact of earlier life events as shaped by historical events on subsequent ones
Research shows that clearly that major life transitions can occur at many different ages, across people and generations. First appearing in adolescence research has shown that life transitions are more continuous and multidirectional than previously thought. The emphasis in life-course perspective on interrelations between the individual in society with reference to historical time has made it a dominant view in the social sciences.
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