Being Responsive to Questions That Drive You Posted on December 10, 2007 John E. Bates (bio) offers his take on developmental research.

I think one of the things that I found is that I needed to do longitudinal research in order to answer my questions. My questions were how do these problems or good adjustments come about? And I realized I had to do longitudinal research. I had not been specifically trained in longitudinal research. But I think if you’re really responsive to the questions that drive you, you will find ways to learn what you need to learn, so you don’t have to know everything.

At least, I don’t think you have to know everything before you start doing your research. You can jump in and you can start learning it as you go. That was the most challenging thing for me in longitudinal research though is that as the children get older, you have to learn a whole new literature, because while you’re following kids longitudinally, there’s a huge research world out there with people who are specializing in one developmental phase or another and they’re really learning a lot about individual stages of development. So it’s a real challenge for a longitudinal researcher to try to grow with the kids and find out what you need to know in these different developmental phases.

Another thing that I think was important in shaping the kind of research that I did was that I did use the kind of training that I had. One of the kinds of training that I did get was in psychometrics and in the early days in developmental psychology, social development research, there weren’t as many people who were psychometrically sophisticated, so for example, developing measures of say social adjustment, there weren’t as many people that really understood; or temperament is an area that I’ve looked at, there weren’t as many people who knew how to do that and so that was one contribution that I could make.

What my contribution would be now, I don’t know, because it’s a whole new field. And I think developmentalists are a lot more psychometrically sophisticated than they used to be.

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