Читать книгу Child Development From Infancy to Adolescence - Laura E. Levine - Страница 80

As you learn about child development, it is easy to assume others have had the same or similar experiences to yours with the same or similar consequences. Your own experiences are meaningful and real. They are part of what has made you the person you are today and help shape the person you will be tomorrow. That fact is never in question, but trying to generalize from your particular experience to general statements about everyone else’s experience is always dangerous. Likewise, when we conduct research we cannot necessarily generalize findings based on one population to another population that might have different characteristics.

The opposite of this is also true. The conclusions drawn from research may not describe what your personal experiences were, but this does not mean the research is invalid. Rather it reminds us that research describes the outcome for groups, not for every individual within a group. When we say men are more physically aggressive than women, for instance, it does not mean every man is more aggressive than any woman, only that on average there is a difference between the groups, and within the groups there is a good deal of individual variability.