Handbook of Developmental Systems Theory and Methodology PDF Download

Author: Peter C. M. Molenaar
Publisher: Guilford Publications
ISBN: 1462513077
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 529

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Book Description
Developmental systems theory provides powerful tools for predicting complex, dynamic interactions among biological and environmental processes in human behavior and health. This groundbreaking handbook provides a roadmap for integrating key concepts of developmental systems theory (such as self-organization, reciprocal dynamic interaction, and probabilistic epigenesis) and simulation models (connectionist and agent-based models) with advanced dynamic modeling approaches for testing these theories and models. Internationally renowned developmental science scholars present innovations in research design, measurement, and analysis that offer new means of generating evidence-based decisions to optimize the course of health and positive functioning across the life span. Topics include epigenetic development and evolution; the relationship between neural systems growth and psychological development; the role of family environments in shaping children's cognitive skills and associated adult outcomes, and more.

Author: Donald H. Ford
Publisher: SAGE Publications, Incorporated
ISBN:
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
For decades there hasn't been an integrative theory of development, only theories about various developmental domains such as language acquisition, personality, and peer relations. Two leading developmentalists, Donald H. Ford and Richard M. Lemer, present the first integrative theory on human development. Through a synthesis of developmental contextualism and the Living Systems Framework, the authors develop a theory that examines how a person carries out transactions with their environment and through that transction how their biological, psychological, behavioral, and environmental elements change or remain constant. They also offer important implications of Developmental Systems Theory (DST) for research, implications for use in educational and clinical settings, and the usefulness of DST in the formulation of social policy. By intergrating the result from many research investigations into a larger framework, Developmental Systems Theory offer researchers, professionals, and students a better understanding of how multiple elements interact and shape a person's life.

Author: Susan Oyama
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262650632
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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Book Description
The nature/nurture debate is not dead. Dichotomous views of development still underlie many fundamental debates in the biological and social sciences. Developmental systems theory (DST) offers a new conceptual framework with which to resolve such debates. DST views ontogeny as contingent cycles of interaction among a varied set of developmental resources, no one of which controls the process. These factors include DNA, cellular and organismic structure, and social and ecological interactions. DST has excited interest from a wide range of researchers, from molecular biologists to anthropologists, because of its ability to integrate evolutionary theory and other disciplines without falling into traditional oppositions.The book provides historical background to DST, recent theoretical findings on the mechanisms of heredity, applications of the DST framework to behavioral development, implications of DST for the philosophy of biology, and critical reactions to DST.

Author: Ellen A. Skinner
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429820755
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 491

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Book Description
Everything you always wanted to know about theories, meta-theories, methods, and interventions but didn’t realize you needed to ask. This innovative textbook takes advanced undergraduate and graduate students "behind the curtain" of standard developmental science, so they can begin to appreciate the generative value and methodological challenges of a lifespan developmental systems perspective. It envisions applied developmental science as focused on ways to use knowledge about human development to help solve societal problems in real-life contexts, and considers applied developmental research to be purpose driven, field based, community engaged, and oriented toward efforts to optimize development. Based on the authors’ more than 25 years of teaching, this text is designed to help researchers and their students intentionally create a cooperative learning community, full of arguments, doubts, and insights, that can facilitate their own internal paradigm shifts, one student at a time. With the aid of extensive online supplementary materials, students of developmental psychology as well as students in other psychological subdisciplines (such as industrial-organizational, social, and community psychology) and applied professions that rely on developmental training (such as education, social work, counseling, nursing, health care, and business) will find this to be an invaluable guidebook and toolbox for conceptualizing and studying applied problems from a lifespan developmental systems perspective.

Author: Susan Oyama
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822380668
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
The Ontogeny of Information is a critical intervention into the ongoing and perpetually troubling nature-nurture debates surrounding human development. Originally published in 1985, this was a foundational text in what is now the substantial field of developmental systems theory. In this revised edition Susan Oyama argues compellingly that nature and nurture are not alternative influences on human development but, rather, developmental products and the developmental processes that produce them. Information, says Oyama, is thought to reside in molecules, cells, tissues, and the environment. When something wondrous occurs in the world, we tend to question whether the information guiding the transformation was pre-encoded in the organism or installed through experience or instruction. Oyama looks beyond this either-or question to focus on the history of such developments. She shows that what developmental “information” does depends on what is already in place and what alternatives are available. She terms this process “constructive interactionism,” whereby each combination of genes and environmental influences simultaneously interacts to produce a unique result. Ontogeny, then, is the result of dynamic and complex interactions in multileveled developmental systems. The Ontogeny of Information challenges specialists in the fields of developmental biology, philosophy of biology, psychology, and sociology, and even nonspecialists, to reexamine the existing nature-nurture dichotomy as it relates to the history and formation of organisms.

Author: Gary G. Fogal
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027261148
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
This volume integrates complex dynamic systems theory (CDST) and L2 writing scholarship through a collection of in-depth studies and commentary across a range of writing constructs, learning contexts, and second and foreign languages. The text is arranged thematically across four topics: (i) perspectives on complexity, accuracy, and fluency, (ii) new constructs, approaches, and domains of L2-writing scholarship, (iii) methodological issues, and finally (iv) curricular perspectives. This work should appeal to graduate students and academics interested in expanded discussions on CDST, highlighting its utility for theorizing and researching language change, and to L2 writing scholars curious about how this fresh approach to researching L2 development can inform understandings of how L2 writing develops. As a CDST approach to language change has matured and taken a place among the dominant epistemologies in the field, students and researchers of L2 development alike will benefit from this volume.

Author: Fred W. Vondracek
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9462096627
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 140

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Book Description
The Living Systems Theory of Vocational Behavior and Development (LSVD) explains and illustrates the processes by which individuals construct their work experiences, vocational pathways and career patterns through episodes of interaction with affordances they recognize within their contexts, and how counseling can facilitate those processes. The LSVD was created by combining the scientifically based systems theory that explicates the dynamics of all aspects of human functioning and development, called Humans as Self-Constructing Living Systems, with important ideas about vocational behavior and development. The resulting integrative theory represents the individual person as a dynamic, self-directing and self-constructing entity, i.e., a living system. Behavior Episodes (BEs) are the fundamental, person-in-context, dynamic units of analysis that serve as the “building blocks” by which individuals construct and retain their experiences in patterns that can be reactivated to facilitate future BEs. The book describes how individuals’ history of satisfying BEs and their current activities provide the means by which vocational and career counselors can assist them to create satisfying vocational pathways. It also describes for researchers how new, non-linear, person-centered, quantitative and qualitative research methods can be used to analyze BE patterns to advance understanding of person-level processes that play key roles in individuals’ vocational behavior and development. The LSVD was designed to be not just an integrative framework for the field of career development, but also to reconnect the field to related areas such as human resources and industrial-organizational psychology and to the range of human sciences that have already embraced a living systems theoretical model.

Author: Richard M. Lerner
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 1135681880
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 1289

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Book Description
A classic in the field, this third edition will continue to be the book of choice for advanced undergraduate and graduate-level courses in theories of human development in departments of psychology and human development. This volume has been substantially revised with an eye toward supporting applied developmental science and the developmental systems perspectives. Since the publication of the second edition, developmental systems theories have taken center stage in contemporary developmental science and have provided compelling alternatives to reductionist theoretical accounts having either a nature or nurture emphasis. As a consequence, a developmental systems orientation frames the presentation in this edition. This new edition has been expanded substantially in comparison to the second edition. Special features include: * A separate chapter focuses on the historical roots of concepts and theories of human development, on philosophical models of development, and on developmental contextualism. * Two new chapters surrounding the discussion of developmental contextualism--one on developmental systems theories wherein several exemplars of such models are discussed and a corresponding chapter wherein key instances of such theories--life span, life course, bioecological, and action theoretical ones--are presented. * A new chapter on cognition and development is included, contrasting systems' approaches to cognitive development with neo-nativist perspectives. * A more differentiated treatment of nature-oriented theories of development is provided. There are separate chapters on behavior genetics, the controversy surrounding the study of the heritability of intelligence, work on the instinctual theory of Konrad Lorenz, and a new chapter on sociobiology. * A new chapter concentrates on applied developmental science.

Author: Richard Lerner
Publisher: Academic Press
ISBN: 0123864925
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 435

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Book Description
Each chapter provides in-depth discussions and this volume serves as an invaluable resource for Developmental or educational psychology researchers, scholars, and students. Includes chapters that highlight some of the most recent research in the area of Positive Youth Development Each chapter provides in-depth discussions An invaluable resource for developmental or educational psychology researchers, scholars, and students

Author: Wendy Patton
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 946209635X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 476

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Book Description
Career Development and Systems Theory: Connecting Theory and Practice offers practitioners, researchers and students a comprehensive introduction to, and overview of, career theory; introduces the Systems Theory Framework of career development; and demonstrates its considerable contemporary and innovative application to practice. A number of authors have identified the framework as one of a small number of significant innovations in the career development literature. The Systems Theory Framework of career development was developed to provide coherence to the career development field by providing a comprehensive conceptualisation of the many existing theories and concepts relevant to understanding career development. It is not designed to be a theory of career development; rather systems theory is introduced as the basis for an overarching, or metatheoretical, framework within which all concepts of career development, described in the plethora of career theories, can be usefully positioned and utilised in both theory and practice. It has been applied to the career development of children, adolescents and women. Since its first publication, the Systems Theory Framework has been the basis of numerous publications focusing on theoretical application and integration, practice and research, with a growing number of these by authors other than the framework developers. Its application across cultures also has been emphasised. The theoretical and practical unity of the Systems Theory Framework makes this book a worthy addition to the professional libraries of practitioners, researchers and students, new to, or experienced in, the field of career development.