The book you have just opened deals with thousands of billions of dollars – and much more.
If you are a taxpayer (or aspire to become a taxpayer), or a parent (or plan to become a parent), some of those dollars, euros or pounds will be yours. It costs a lot to raise children, to provide the care and services that they will need on the long journey to adulthood; these costs are met by families, public services, and charities. If you are a practitioner in a field related to human development and well-being, or a policymaker engaged in decisions about the distribution of resources across services, you will be aware that the costs borne by the broader community are enormous – so much so that we often do not have enough to address all needs.
And the costs multiply when things go wrong. Consider the economic costs:
- when children are exposed to abusive, discordant or inadequate family contexts (Cicchetti et al., Chapter 15; Cummings et al., Chapter 3; Dishion and Yasui, Chapter 17; Moreland and Dumas, Chapter 4; Sanders and Calam, Chapter 5);
- when millions of children receive poor child care (Hardway and McCartney, Chapter 7); or their parents encounter inadequate advice (Leach, Chapter 2);
- when educational services consign whole generations to methods of reading instruction that fly in the face of research evidence (Johnston and Watson, Chapter 9), fail to exploit the benefits of research-based innovations in mathematical education (Ginsburg and Ertle, Chapter 10) or fail to detect hidden disabilities that impact on learning yet are at least amenable to therapy (Conti-Ramsden and Durkin, Chapter 16);
- when children are victims of bullying (Smith, Chapter 12), avoidable accidents (Thomson, Chapter 13), or prejudice (Cameron & Rutland, Chapter 14, Patterson & Farr, Chapter 6);
- when societies fail to provide adequate help to children and young people with, or at risk of, mental health problems (Cooper and Knitzer, Chapter 18);
- when adolescents veer into antisocial behavior and high risk taking (Dishion and Yashui, Chapter 17);
- when teenagers become pregnant (Martin and Brooks-Gunn, Chapter 8);
- when young people enter society with poor understanding of their rights, responsibilities and opportunities as citizens (Helwig & Yang, Chapter 11).
As several of the contributors point out, the profoundly difficult topics with which they are dealing are associated with enormous, ongoing material costs to nations worldwide. The best available (most rigorously computed) estimates tend to be for the leading industrialized nations, but readers from other countries will be able to see the broad implications for their own economies. When things go wrong in child development, or in families, or as young people meet institutional or societal problems, or when children’s potential is neglected or thwarted, there are immediate costs to the individuals and social structures involved, followed by financial repercussions that can extend over decades.
Importantly, the biggest costs are likely to be incurred when we do little or nothing to address the issues, problems and needs (Aboud & Yousafzai, 2015; Scott, Knapp, Henderson, & Maughan, 2001). The economics of intervention are complex and vary across contexts (including whether they are preventive or remedial) and time frames; this is not our primary concern here but it is relevant to bear in mind that interventions to support healthy development have been reported to show benefit-to-cost ratios ranging from 3:1 to 18:1 (Engle et al., 2011; Hardway & McCartney, Chapter 7, this volume; Heckman, 2006; Reynolds, Temple, White, Ou,& Robertson, 2011). Intervention does cost – but it also returns. Furthermore, provided that the benefits are demonstrable in high quality research, this is an equation that resonates with policymakers and the layperson (Moreland & Dumas, Chapter 4, this volume).
Readers will already have considered that, of course, in each of the above contexts there are other costs: the psychological costs of stress and suffering. It is sobering to reflect, as we progress through the authoritative reviews in the chapters ahead, that we are not surprised to learn that so many children face circumstances and events that are, literally, terrifying. Children suffer maltreatment and abuse at home. The caregivers that children depend upon may be in the throes of marital conflict that affects the whole household. In the playground or park, many children are victimized. Many face ethnic prejudice in their schools or communities. Some will enter gangs by their early teens, and some of these are soon on their way to prisons. Early sexual activities can lead to premature parenthood, with radical impact on individuals’ circumstances and prospects. Still more tragically, the privations and cruelties that life can inflict are not distributed evenly; many young people are exposed to combinations or accumulations of these adversities. Our contributors speak to these concerns and, for many of the present authors, the alleviation of unhappiness and suffering is a key motivation for advancing applied developmental psychology.
Another dimension of costs, interrelated with the above, is the impact of developmental problems on the quality of society. As well as the economic liabilities of less-than-optimal literacy and numeracy education, these skills impact in countless ways on the conduct of everyday life. As well as the psychological detriment to direct victims of abuse or antisocial behavior, there are indirect costs to many more in terms of the ways we perceive and experience our communities. It is hard to quantify the economic costs of poor moral reasoning abilities or deficient civics education, but suppose a substantial sector of the population reaches adulthood with no conception of their own or others’ rights. As Helwig and Yang (Chapter 11) draw to our attention, the consequences for society of shortcomings in moral understanding, grasp of the principles of justice, democratic processes, and the rights and duties of democratic citizenship are profound. Yet we still struggle with (or, in some societies, ignore completely) how this vital area of education can best be conducted. Their chapter demonstrates how applied developmental research has the potential to provide theoretically-based yet practical routes to stimulating advances in moral and civic education – but also that it is confronted by many real-world obstacles.
In the face of the diverse costs of the many potential problems besetting human development, it follows that we should be asking how developmental science can help us to address them. Answering this question is the central purpose of this Handbook. Accordingly, the volume sets out to describe and analyze what happens when researchers offer the fruits of their studies to potential recipients – be they professional workers in the field, local or national organizations, parents or the general public. Its aims are to examine the process of knowledge transfer and implementation, in order to investigate both the opportunities and obstacles involved and to consider the factors that lead to successes and disappointments. To this end we draw on the experience of a range of academics representing a variety of topics in developmental psychology with definite implications for practice, all of whom are willing to share the experiences they encountered when confronting the “giving away” process as part of their work.
Can we Give Away Developmental Psychology?
There is widespread awareness these days that developmental research is producing a considerable body of knowledge that is not only theoretically significant but is potentially useful in the real world. It follows that the outcomes of research studies ought, therefore, to be passed on to practitioners and policymakers, and many publications now include a section on the implications the findings obtained have for intervention. Nevertheless, the impact of research-based knowledge on practice has been patchy – notably successful in some areas, leading to significant advances in the well-being of children and their families, yet in other areas there is still a considerable gap between research and its application.
Clearly, the giving away process is not a straightforward one; in particular, one needs to question the still prevailing assumption among many people that it is a simple unidirectional matter of knowledgeable researchers communicating their findings to ignorant practitioners willing to abandon previous practices and adopt new ideas. Publicizing research results and pointing out their implications is only part of the story; their implementation is another; and it is the latter that is now in need of close attention.
Developmental psychologists are engaged in pursuing two aims. One is to add further to the body of knowledge we have accumulated so far about psychological development, in order to determine the processes responsible for change over age and formulate the theoretical principles which would help us to understand how and why development occurs. This is generally referred to as basic research, in that it is theory driven, is mostly conducted with traditional scientific methodology and constitutes understanding for the sake of understanding. The second aim is a practical one, namely to help children avoid or at least overcome the hazards of life, to make the most of their capacities and to attain optimal competence in social and cognitive spheres. Such applied research includes both prevention and intervention efforts; it takes place in real-life locations and sets out to solve society’s problems as they impinge on children and their families.
These two aims – understanding and helping – have been somewhat uneasy bedfellows over the years. Various questions arise: Are the two compatible, in that both can be regarded as part of the same discipline? Moreover, can any one individual researcher effectively pursue both aims, even within the same investigation? Is one more “respectable” than the other? Do they require different skills and, therefore, different training courses? Can basic research benefit from the lessons learned by applied work, as much as vice versa? Developmental psychologists have taken different views as to how the tension between the two aims can be resolved, and there have indeed been “fashions” in the answer provided. Thus, even in the relatively short history of developmental psychology one can roughly distinguish three periods, in each of which a particular attitude prevailed.
