3.4: What would a relational organismic-contextualist systems-thinking type researcher do to deal with the problem of developmental measurement equivalence ?

You can probably guess the two prongs of the response: (1) don't try to get rid of it by sticking to a narrow age range or focusing on appraisals, instead look it dead in the eye; and (2) and then look it dead in the other eye and the other eye, that is, from many different perspectives. Let’s consider three options. 

First, it would be possible to take a category of behavior, for example, any one from our catalog in Table 21.1, say “biting,” and follow it along its little lifespan, noting its first appearance as a strategy of aggression, its changing frequency and the proximal processes it gets itself into—what elicits it, what alternative responses the individual has in the same situations, its contingencies, the kinds of responses it prompts from peers and adults, what kinds of situations and states pull it out after it has virtually disappeared, and so on. We could follow the individual arcs of all these aggressive behaviors—their emergence, usage, integration, substitution, demise, and resurrection. We can use individuals’ ages as an index and so see how biting (and other forms of aggression) appear and disappear, as well as the proximal processes (e.g., attacks by older siblings or parental socialization) that prolong their use or support more socially-acceptable alternatives. This kind of a research strategy, pictured in Figure 21.3, is thinking bottom-up, from behavior to proximal processes, and allows us to watch behaviors appear or disappear, and change or remain the same in their functions and meaning with age.

What is the second strategy?

A second option, pictured in Figure 21.4, is to think top-down, for example, from appraisals to proximal processes. This kind of program of study allows researchers to stick with their beloved appraisals, but to ask the musical question: “What are the proximal processes that give rise to these appraisals and how do they change with age?” So, for example, researchers working within self-determination theory have shown that students’ experiences of autonomy support in their classrooms and from their teachers create contexts that allow intrinsic motivation, identified self-regulation, enthusiastic engagement, constructive coping, conceptual learning, and other good things, to flourish. So Johnmarshall Reeve set out to discover “what autonomy supportive teachers do” by conducting a series of observational studies in which he examined the kinds of teacher behaviors, curricula, assignments, proximal processes, and so on, that appear in classrooms students appraise as “autonomy supportive” (Reeve, 2006; Reeve, & Jang, 2006; Reeve, Bolt, & Cai, 1999). This is exactly the kind of information that interventionists need to help teachers support students’ autonomy, and it would be possible to examine whether there are regular developmental changes in the kinds of teacher behaviors, academic activities, and proximal processes that lead students to feel autonomy support in their classrooms.

Insert Figure 20.4

The development of perceived control: Adding experiences of control

Another excellent example of how to combine the study of appraisals and proximal processes to create a developmental story can be found in work on perceived control. The beginning of the story doesn’t seem very developmental: Researchers point out that perceptions of control are an important marker and predictor of good things (e.g., effort and engagement, constructive coping, positive emotions) across the lifespan— clearly documented from 4-months of age (when babies vigorously kick their legs to operate a mobile whose movement is contingent on their actions and who give up and gaze sadly at the mobile when the contingencies are cut) to oldest age (when interventions in which visitors come contingently have been shown to prolong life expectancy). These kinds of claims sound like the workings of a universal ageindependent human need—the need to be effective in one’s interactions with the context (White, 1959).

Not particularly developmental, eh? In fact, the vast majority of research (and the research on control is seriously vast) looks at individual differences in perceptions of control and their differential effects. Almost no developmental literature exists.

However, a huge developmental swarm of ideas swoops into this area when researchers add the idea of proximal processes, in the form of “experiences of control.” Suddenly the question becomes—what kinds of experiences contribute to a person’s feelings of efficacy, competence or control? And the answers to that question differ mightily by developmental level. We need to think about the representational and cognitive strategies infants, children, and adolescents use to extract causal information out of strings of interactions with the context, the changing means that individuals have to exert control, the varying roles that participation by other people play (for example, when help from others boosts a sense of control at younger ages but then subsequently undermines in), when inferential processes allow causes of effort to be differentiated from causes like task difficulty, luck, and one’s own ability, and when such inferential processes start to create a closed loop, such that beliefs launch actions that create experiences that verify the originating beliefs.

We could go on. But you get the idea. We are not trying to create equivalence, we want to see how the experiences that generate perceptions of control change with age. We use the “constant” (i.e., the power of perceived control) as a compass to guide the study of the changing parts that continually recreate that constant.

What is the third strategy?

The third strategy is to stick with the same construct and then ride it through all the peaks and valleys of its transformations—which require qualitatively different measures at different ages. In this, admittedly challenging strategy, the comparability or glue between these measures are “developmentally-friendly conceptualizations” that create a space to hold the changing manifestations of the construct. A great example can be taken from attachment research which includes the important construct of “proximity-seeking,” a species general biobehavioral strategy that brings infants in contact with their caregivers when the infants are distressed. This construct becomes developmental as soon as we start to wonder how infants can seek proximity at different developmental periods using the capacities that are available to them at those periods. So, for example, the earliest forms of “proximity seeking” are actually carried out by the caregiver in response to newborns cries, diffuse body movements, and other expressions of distress (can you detect the proximal processes happening here?). As newborns apprehend these contingencies, they can start to direct their expressions so that they become communications. We will spare you the blow-by-blow, but just keep asking the same question as new capacities develop—Now how can you seek proximity? And you will see as reaching, calling, and finally locomotion are added, and the balance shifts from the caregiver to the infant in seeking proximity. If you keep going long enough, you will end up with adolescents texting or imagining what Dad would say in this difficult situation.