The only way in which we will ever be able to truly know what a child is thinking is to get inside his/her mind. Once we get to know what causes children to do things, we will be able to connect our discoveries with others. And then we will be one step closer to understanding child development or whatever else you are experimenting with. There have been many experiments performed to try and learn what a child is thinking at different times. We have learned many things from many different scientists and without the earlier psychologists like Jean Piaget, we would not know what we are today. The psychologists can use many different research methods in order to get the information they need for their research.
In an article written by Nigel Thomas and Claire O'Kane, the two psychologists discussed children's behavior. They studied what happens when a child has to make a decision and also how they react when an adult talks to them about the way they felt.
Français : Portrait de groupe avec Pierre Bovet (...
Even very young children perform rudimentary exper...
Werner Erhard and Associates v. Christopher Cox fo...In Thomas and O'Kane's experiment, children ages 8-12 were used as the subjects to gain data and all the information they could find. The research methods used here were experiments and case studies. Experiments and case studies can be very useful to examine the behavior and mental processes associated with a specific person or situation. In this case, it is the children being examined.
Another possible way to do research is to do surveys. Surveys are standard sets of questions asked of a large number of participants. The problem with surveys is that questions on the standard test may lean to one of the answers and give it away. The tests are biased. Also, it could be hard to tell if someone filled out a survey seriously or just...