Читать книгу Developmental Psychopathology - Группа авторов - Страница 43

A central methodological challenge in developmental psychopathology concerns establishing causal relationships. One way to establish causation is through a randomized controlled trial (RCT) in which individuals are randomly assigned to a condition/treatment or a control. Because individuals were assigned at random, there should be no other factor that explains group differences beyond the experimental manipulation. RCT’s are considered the “gold standard” in understanding causality; however, there are ethical and logistical concerns to designing experiments. To study the effects of living in poverty on developmental outcomes, it would not be ethical to take one child and randomly assign them to live in poverty and assign another to live in a wealthy home; thus, researchers must sample from different populations to compare effects, a method that does not truly assess causation. Similarly, researchers cannot intentionally design experiments to expose children to adverse experiences. However, researchers have utilized “experiments of nature” to understand how early adversity shapes developmental and neurobiological outcomes.