Outline and evaluate research into the effects of day-care on children’s social development. (12 Marks) Shea is a study made to examine the influences of day care on children’s behavioural and social developments. This investigation was produced by videotaping infants at the nursery in the playground aged between 3 and 4. The infant’s behaviour was evaluated in relations of aggression, rough-and-tumble play, and frequency of peer interactions, distance from the nearest child and distance from the teacher.
The results of the observation shows that in the duration of the ten weeks the infants peer interactions had risen and the distance from the teacher reduced. The results also show a cut in aggression and a rise in rough and tumble play. The rise in social behaviour seemed more clearly in the infant that attended the nursery 5-days-a-week rather than those who attended 2-days-a-week. The researchers concluded that day care increases the chance of infants to develop into becoming more sociable and less aggressive.
In general the study was a naturalistic observation which means that there was no controlled variable therefore the study has high ecological validity due to none of the behaviours being manipulated. Due to the independent variables not being controlled this makes the observation an advantage because in other situations it would be unethical to manipulate the variables and in this study it always the researches the examine what would be unethical for them to control e.g. the observer cannot control whether the children went to nursery 2/5 days a week.
The observation does have some disadvantages. The drawbacks of this study contain the fact that you cannot identify if one specific variable triggered the change in the other as the observer does not control the IV. E.g. in the observation we cannot be 100% sure that the total of days in which infants attend nursery makes them have better peer interactions and less aggression. In the results are subjective which means that the viewers can be biased about what they record in order to please what they want to find out.
Also there are a lot more observations that also say that day-care has a major influence on the social development such as the EEPE project. The EPPE project investigated the effects pre-school education has on the social development of infants aged between 3 and 7 years old. A inclusive range of over 3000 children between the ages of 3 to 7 were studied longitudinally till the end of their key stage 1 education. The EPPE project found that Children who went to day care showed a rise in independence and peer sociability at 5 years. This study also established that an early start in day care between 2 and 3 years was also related with being more sociable with other children.
The findings recommended to the researchers that being in day care increases social development and improves peer relations. This study is rather reliable as it studied a wide range of infants as it doesn’t just increase the honesty of the study but it also allows it to be easier for the researchers to generalize their results but with restrained confidence. It cannot be generalized with demonstrative confidence as it is UK based therefore it maybe ethnocentric to evaluate infants around the world just according to these findings. The study may also be seen as reliable because of the high consistency of the finding. It has high consistency throughout due to the same outcomes being found in all the 3000 infants studied.