Psych Essay, Research Paper
The five journal articles I examined were all from a journal
titled Developmental Psychology, May 2000. The first
journal article that I observed was ?Sleep Patterns and
Sleep Disruptions in School-Aged Children.? This study
assessed the sleep patterns, sleep disruptions, and
sleepiness of school-age children. Sleep patterns of 140
children (72 boys and 68 girls; 2nd-, 4th-, and 6th-grade
students) were evaluated with activity monitors
(actigraphs). In addition, the children and their parents
completed complementary sleep questionnaires and daily
reports. The findings reflected significant age differences,
indicating that older children have more delayed sleep onset
times and increased reported daytime sleepiness. Girls were
found to spend more time in sleep and to have an increased
percentage of motionless sleep. Fragmented sleep was found
in 18% of the children. No age differences were found in any
of the sleep quality measures. Scores on objective sleep
measures were associated with subjective reports of
sleepiness. Family stress, parental age, and parental
education were related to the child’s sleep-wake measures.
The next article I observed was ?Shared Caregiving:
Comparisons Between Home and Child-Care Settings.? The
experiences of 84 German toddlers (12-24 months old) who
were either enrolled or not enrolled in child care were
described with observational checklists from the time they
woke up until they went to bed. The total amount of care
experienced over the course of a weekday by 35 pairs of
toddlers (1 member of each pair in child care, 1 member not)
did not differ according to whether the toddlers spent time
in child care. Although the child-care toddlers received
lower levels of care from care providers in the centers,
their mothers engaged them in more social interactions
during non-working hours than did the mothers of home-only
toddlers, which suggests that families using child care
provided different patterns of care than families not using
child care. Child-care toddlers experienced high levels of
emotional support at home, although they experienced less
prompt responses to their distress signals. Mothers’ ages
were unrelated to the amounts of time toddlers spent with
them, but older mothers initiated more closeness.
The next article I wrote on was ?Friendship and Social
Competence in a Sample of Preschool Children Attending Head
Start.? Relations between friendship and social competence
were studied for children (mostly African American)
attending Head Start. Initial analyses showed that children
with reciprocated friends had higher social competence
scores than children without reciprocated friends.
Correlation?s suggested that the number of changed
friendships was associated with the social ability
indicators studied here. Beyond the cost of having no
reciprocated friends, having non-reciprocated friendships
was not a liability. Cross-time analysis suggested differing
patterns of relations for boys and girls. Having, versus not
having a reciprocated friend was unstable across time,
because there was a trend toward participating in
reciprocated friendships from 3 to 4 years of age (most
older children had at least one reciprocated friend). For
girls there was a positive relation between the number of
reciprocated friendships. No benefit (in terms of social
competence) was found for children making the transition
from one classroom to the next with a friend.
The next article was ?Where?s the Ball? Two- and
Three-Year-Olds Reason About Unseen Events.? Children 2, 2
1/2, and 3 years of age engaged in a search task in which
they opened one of four doors in an occluder to retrieve a
ball that had been rolled behind the occluder. The correct
door was determined by a partially visible wall placed
behind the occluder that stopped the motion of the unseen
ball. Only the oldest group of children was able to reliably
choose the correct door. All children were able to retrieve
a toy that had been hidden in the same apparatus if the toy
was hidden from the front by opening a door. Analysis of the
younger children’s errors indicated that they did not search
randomly but instead used a variety of strategies. The
results are consistent with the Piagetian view that the
ability to use representations to guide action develops
slowly over the first years of life.
The final article I read was ?Gender, Affiliation,
Assertion, and the Interactive Context of Parent-Child
Play.? In this study ninety-eight young U.S. children
(average age-4 years) with either European, Latin American,
or multiple ethnic backgrounds were videotaped with their
mothers and their fathers on separate occasions in their
families’ homes. Parent-child pairs played for 8 minutes
each with a feminine-stereotyped toy set (foods and plates)
and a masculine-stereotyped toy set (track and cars). Levels
of affiliation (engaging vs. distancing) and assertion
(direct vs. non-direct) were rated on 7-point scales every 5
seconds from the videotapes for both parent and child.
Overall, the play activity accounted for a large proportion
of the variance in parents’ and children’s mean affiliation
and assertion ratings. Some hypothesized gender-related
differences in behavior were also observed. In addition,
exploratory analyses revealed some differences between the
different ethnic groups. The results highlight the
importance of role modeling and activity settings in the
socialization and social construction of gender.