Developmental Psychopathology. Группа авторов

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the emphasis on multiple levels of analyses, developmental psychopathology is well poised to integrate knowledge across diverse scientific disciplines into a multidisciplinary effort. Many scientists may only study one of these systems; thus, developmental psychopathology encourages collaboration and interdisciplinary research to study how these systems interact and influence one another.

      Exploring Both Risk and Protective Factors to Delineate Pathways of Risk and Resilience

Schematic illustratration of common Risk and Protective Factors in Child Outcomes. Risk Factors Increase the Likelihood of a Negative Outcome, Whereas Protective Factors Buffer Against Risk, Decrease the Likelihood of Adverse Outcomes, and Promote Successful Outcomes

      Involving Reciprocal, Transactional Models of Influence in the Field’s Causal Models

      Lastly, developmental psychopathology involves reciprocal transactional models of influence. What does that mean? For a long time, researchers believed in a linear model of development, such as early brain injury causing child development of cognitive, social, or emotional problems. However, this belief ignores children with brain injuries that develop normally and children with developmental problems without evidence of a brain injury.

      Additionally, the “nature or nurture” debate assumed that developmental outcomes were a product of either nature (genetics, biology) or nurture (parenting, environment) alone. Later on, theorists began to adopt a more transactional model of development (Sameroff & Chandler, 1975). It is now accepted that concepts of nature and nurture are not as easily separated as once thought.

      On the nature side, the field of epigenetics has demonstrated that even when individuals have the same genetic “code,” the environment can influence the expression of genes or which genes “turn on.” On the nurture side, research has shown that children’s inherent individual personality, temperament, or other traits can influence how their parent responds to them. Thus, in the transactional model, a child’s outcomes are a product of the continuous, dynamic, reciprocal interactions of the child and experiences provided by their family and social context (Sameroff & Mackenzie, 2003). The remaining chapters in this book will give concrete examples of gene–environment interactions that have been discovered.

Schematic illustratration of contrasting Linear and Transactional Models for Explaining Developmental Problems

      The complex nature of the developmental psychopathology requires a variety of advanced methods to study its questions. This section will provide a brief overview of the methods used to study developmental psychopathology; these methods will be discussed further in subsequent chapters. The key principles of developmental psychopathology directly inform the methods used to study it. Developmental psychopathology research is often longitudinal, examines risk and protective factors, maps trajectories of traits or behaviors, and incorporates multiple levels of analyses across disciplines. Thus, the field must utilize research designs and statistical methods that can appropriately address these types of research questions.

      RESEARCH DESIGNS

       Longitudinal

      The developmental psychopathology perspective emphasizes the significance of prospective longitudinal research designs that follow a sample of individuals across time for multiple time points. If a researcher wants to investigate the association between childhood maltreatment and development of depression in adolescence, they could design a prospective longitudinal study that first examines a sample of young children and asks parents about maltreatment experiences and depression symptoms. Then, researchers would follow up during adolescence for another report of depression symptoms. This method allows researchers to study how depression symptoms develop from early childhood to adolescence and ask about current maltreatment experiences in early childhood.

       Cross‐sectional

      A cross‐sectional design occurs when researchers do not sample variables over time. Researchers may assess development in children over different ages, rather than following the same children over time. An advantage is that the study may be more feasible in that participants do not have to be followed over time.

      Retrospective research methodologies are also widely used in developmental studies. Retrospective studies ask subjects to report on prior experiences, such as exposure to life stress, maltreatment, or other life experiences that occurred prior to the current point in time. An important note is that there are often differing results from studies that use retrospective versus prospective designs (Baldwin et al., 2019).


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