3.5: How did attachment researchers blow up that developmental balloon so successfully?

They identified an “organizational construct” with an important function, and then they followed across development the ways that the actions of infants, young children, older children and adolescents can serve that function with the capacities available to them at different ages. It is a combination of thought experiment (“how do we imagine they could do that?”) and empirical question (“how are you doing that?”) and it can be applied to any function. We provide another example of this idea in the research on coping during childhood and adolescence over the last decade, which has come to rely on “developmentally-friendly” conceptualizations of coping-- ones that move away from notions of coping as a list of strategies people can call on to solve problems and relieve distress, and toward views that highlight the basic adaptive functions of coping in detecting and appraising threats, mobilizing and tuning action, and learning from stressful encounters (see box).

This shift to conceptualizations that focus on higher-order functions characterizes research across many domains, so-called “functional perspectives” on may interesting phenomena—such as the functions of emotion, attention, and neurological subsystems. It is easy to see how this larger functional view can unite actions that have a very different surface appearance, such as when the study of language has replaced by the study of “communication,” which then incorporates pre-language verbal and non-verbal means of expression, or the study of walking is replaced by the study of “locomotion,” which then incorporates creeping and crawling as well. Perhaps not as immediately obvious, these functional theories shift the focus of researchers from the structure of individuals’ behaviors or actions to their goals—the reasons why agentic individuals are motivated to pursue these activities, in service of their own intentions, such as to get to Mom, to allow me to get my eyes and hands on that attractive object, to relieve my distress, to let Dad know what I want. An illustration is provided in Figure 21.5 for the development of coping (see box).

Insert Figure 20.5 about here

Developmentally-friendly families of coping

In the research on coping, the building blocks of the area are considered to be “ways of coping,” which depict how people actually deal with real stressors right on the ground, and they include ways like problem-solving, escape, seeking support, or distraction. A problem that has bedeviled the area is the identification of core ways of coping. Dozens of sets of coping strategies have been proposed that include hundreds of ways of coping (Skinner, Edge, Altman, & Sherwood, 2003). This massive drift of potential strategies has made it difficult to integrate studies on coping, which utilize a wide variety of partially overlapping coping categories. Recent theoretical and empirical work has resulted in the idea of a small set (maybe a dozen) of higher-order “families” of coping that are defined by their functions in dealing with stress. For example, the family of “problem-solving” coping includes lower-order ways of bringing one’s actions in line with current contingencies, like effort, instrumental action, strategizing, and so on. Or the family of “accommodation” coping includes lower order ways that bring one’s preferences in line with currently available options, like focus on the positive, cognitive reappraisal, distraction, and so on. Researchers can hypothesize and discover age-graded members of these families by using developmental analyses to identify the ways that individuals can carry out these functions at different ages depending on the capacities available to them. For example, infants can “seek information” through social referencing or they can “escape” using gaze aversion. This line of research promises to create a body of developmental research on coping, that allows us to propose and study important constructs that show qualitative shifts in their manifestation (and hence in their measurement) across age.