Task 1
Child study is a very complex field; human beings, and children, specifically, are very complex. Consequently, simple answers and solutions to problems are very often too simple. A short example helps make the point. Most of us have had the unfortunate experience of having problems with our car. The reason is, compared to children, cars are VERY SIMPLE! If well-trained professionals have difficulty with this relatively simple entity, think of the difficulty involved in "figuring out" children, who are vastly more complex than even the most complex car.
Child study starts with working with children. First we try to understand the ways in which they develop, grow, and learn in their everyday habitats. This knowledge is then used to design environments for children. Various theories attempt to explain the meaning of children's behavior and development, provide different methods of collecting child data, and show how intervening in children's lives can facilitate optimal development. By its very nature, therefore, child study is interdisciplinary. In this volume we draw from theory and research in fields ranging, literally, from anthropology to zoology.
This interdisciplinary approach to child study makes the field stronger because children are viewed from many different perspectives. Indeed, an interdisciplinary approach is necessary to understand the complex behavior of children.
The essay focuses on the literature review of the approaches to the study of children, food and sweet eating. These studies are concern on childhood obesity and early onset of dental caries. The review discusses five research methods such as the bio-medical approaches, psycho-analytical approaches, materialist approaches, post-structuralist and chidlren’s culture.
The bio-medical approach studies the food and eating in terms of nutrition, this method put their attention to the poor diet and its link to connected health problems like obesity and dental caries. This method believes that good habits of eating should be developed during the early stage of childhood.
The psycho-analytical approach is entirely different from the bio-medical approach, this method studies the food and eating on the emotional perspective. Eating gives an erotic pleasure, while the structuralist approach is an alternative, this thinks that food is a code or a language, from which a society discloses its hidden structure.
The materialist studies food on the political economy perspective. They believe that food is significant but beyond nutrition. This approach is bound up with power, exclusion and inclusion and cultural ideas. At the same time the post-structuralist approach, analyses the notion of fragmented identity that is studying the context within a culture, this includes the power relations inside that culture. When speaking of culture it is necessary to discuss children’s culture. Why children love sweets? What are the values, concerns, routines and activities of children that they develop and share?
Although different theories of context were presented, we concluded that those theories which specified the transaction between contexts and persons were most accurate. We also examined more closely the school context, from the level of theory guiding school practice to the specifics of within-classroom variation, and attempted to describe the ways in which school practices should be consistent with the philosophical and psychological theories behind them.
Task 2- Qualitative and Quantitative Research
Qualitative research is the attempt to gain an in-depth understanding of the meanings of the situation presented by informants, rather than the manufacturing of a quantitative measurement' of their characteristics or behavior by the researcher. This concern to reveal the subjective points of view of those being studied is common to ethnography, participant observation, and the various other strands of qualitative research. For many qualitative researchers the subjective beliefs of the people being studied are more important than the theoretical knowledge of the researcher. The methodology is often to ‘see through’ the eyes of those being studied. There are two considerations. First, no attempt is made to place the beliefs and behavior of the people being studied into an historical or structural context; it is considered sufficient to simply describe different forms of consciousness without trying to explain how and why they developed. The second one is the tendency to adopt an uncritical attitude to the beliefs and consciousness of informants, without considering their adequacy. The result is a form of relativism where everyone's testimony is accorded equal status, and no attempt is made either to explain or inform the development of consciousness (, 1990).
The aim of qualitative analysis is a complete, detailed description. No attempt is made to assign frequencies to the linguistic features which are identified in the data, and rare phenomena receives the same amount of attention as more frequent phenomena. Qualitative analysis allows for fine distinctions to be drawn because it is not necessary to assign the data into a finite number of classifications. Ambiguities, which are inherent in human language, can be recognized in the analysis.
The main disadvantage of qualitative approaches to corpus analysis is that their findings can not be extended to wider populations with the same degree of certainty that quantitative analyses can. This is because the findings of the research are not tested to discover whether they are statistically significant or due to chance.
In quantitative research, the more traditional mode, we classify features, count them, and even construct more complex statistical models in an attempt to explain what is observed. Findings can be generalized to a larger population, and direct comparisons can be made so long as valid sampling and significance techniques have been used. Thus, quantitative analysis allows us to discover which phenomena are likely to be genuine reflections of the behavior of a language or variety, and which are merely chance occurrences. The more basic task of just looking at a single language variety allows one to get a precise picture of the frequency and rarity of particular phenomena, and thus their relative normality or abnormality.
However, the picture of the data which emerges from quantitative analysis is less rich than that obtained from qualitative analysis. For statistical purposes, classifications have to be of the hard-and-fast type. An item either belongs to class x or it doesn't. As can be seen, many linguistic terms and phenomena do not therefore belong to simple, single categories: rather they are more consistent with the recent notion of "fuzzy sets". Quantitative analysis is therefore an idealization of the data in some cases. Also, quantitative analysis tends to sideline rare occurrences. To ensure that certain statistical tests (such as chi-squared) provide reliable results, it is essential that minimum frequencies are obtained - meaning that categories may have to be collapsed into one another resulting in a loss of data variety.
Task 3 Survey
Official surveys use many of the same methods in experimental design and random sampling. Surveys on TV watching among children are scales larger and their statistics more general, but they do try both to describe social phenomenon accurately and to ascribe reasons for certain statistical fluctuations, so that solutions can be formulated. However, many government studies are repeated annually; and thus some numbers may no longer depict correctly the actual state of affairs. (, 1990)
Basically, what needs to be measured is not measured. Many statistics do not measure what they claim to measure. Even where they are accurate and wide ranging, they still fail to tell the whole story: they abstract the problem from the local context. The hours spent by children watching TV and the time the parents spent watching TV with their children is an encourage decisions about priorities far beyond the influence of local communities and their own systems of representation. (, 1995).
Principles of experimental design have their roots primarily in the logic of the scientific method. Indeed logicians have made substantial contributions to
the principles o experimental design. compares survey design to architecture, saying that at the planning stages building a design and a bridge requires similar processes. The individual best qualified to design an experiment is the one who is firstly, most familiar with the nature of the experimental material, second, most familiar with the possible alternative methods for designing the experiment, and lastly most capable of evaluating the potential advantages and disadvantages of the alternatives. Where an individual possesses all these qualifications, the experimenter and designer are one.
The most important and relevant consideration in the selection of an experimental design strategy is the determination of the goals of the experiment. The goals of a designed experiment can be stipulated in many ways, including the following hierarchy: first, comprehensively model the response as a function of the factor levels over a range of values, second, comprehensively assess individual and joint factor effects for the specific factor levels included in the experiment, and third, determine the levels of the factors that produce the best responses (, 1962). In addition, statistical models of factor effects on responses can be categorized as: firstly, models about which nothing is known or assumed, second, models assumed to be additive in the individual factor effects, third, models assumed to be linear in the parameters but not necessarily additive in the factor effects, and fourth, models assumed to have a specified nonlinear functional form.
Sampling deliberately includes those data sources that are the richest sources of information in a specific context. Within the deception stance an investigator may use any method necessary to obtain greater understanding in a particular situation. This may involve telling lies, deliberately misrepresenting oneself, 'dumping' others, setting people up, using adversarial interviewing techniques, building friendly trust and infiltrating settings.
The design is particularly important because it is in here that the validity of the results of a study is checked. A thorough methodology will have both the correct method appropriate for the experiment, and the right considerations and variables in order to make a satisfactory conclusion.
References
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