Microgenetica

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Lavelli, Pantoja, Hsu, Messinger, Fogel

CHAPTER THREE Using Microgenetic Designs to Study Change Processes
Manuela Lavelli, Andréa P. F. Pantoja, Hui-Chin Hsu, Daniel Messinger, and Alan Fogel

The process of change represents a main, central issue for the study of development. Basic and applied researchers in developmental science have aimed their research work at answering severalkey questions related to the problem of change. How does change occur? What mechanisms produce change? What conditions are likely to promote the emergence of change in development? Another related question concerns the stability versus instability of new behavioral patterns that emerge as a consequence of an intervention. What are the relationships between variability and stability in developmentalprocesses? Does the emergence of new behavioral patterns tend to suppress the old patterns or to coexist with them? Nevertheless, observing and understanding how change occurs has been recognized to be a quite difficult and challenging task (Miller & Coyle, 1999; Siegler & Crowley, 1991). This is despite recent advances in both theoretical perspectives and methods focused on change processes thathave brought considerable progress in the research field (see “Microgenetic designs as promising tools,” below). Part of the challenge is due to the complexity of conceptualizing change processes. It is our contention, however, that the main problem appears to come from the difficulty of devising and implementing appropriate methods for studying change while it is occurring (Fogel, 1990; Kuhn, 1995;Siegler, 1995), instead of comparing pre- and post-change behavioral patterns. In this chapter, we aim to illustrate a research design, referred to as microgenetic designs, specifically devised for documenting change processes in development. First, we discuss the limitations of traditional research designs to capture ongoing processes of change. We then present microgenetic designs through anillustration of their key characteristics. This is followed by a review of the theoretical foundations of microgenetic designs as well as some of the historical and current observational and experimental

Microgenetic Designs to Study Change Processes 41 studies based on microgenetic designs, illustrating their possibilities. In particular, we give a detailed presentation of therelational-historical approach as a particular form of microgenetic design devised to study developmental change processes in interpersonal relationships. Examples from our studies are given to illustrate the steps of a research program informed by the relational-historical approach. In the following sections of the chapter, we describe different quantitative and qualitative strategies that can be used to analyzedata collected through microgenetic designs. Finally, we discuss the advantages of using microgenetic designs, suggesting new directions for microgenetic research.

Traditional Designs versus Microgenetic Designs
The main methodological difficulty in studying developmental change processes is that traditional research designs do not involve a direct observation of change while it is occurring(Kuhn, 1995). In both cross-sectional and longitudinal designs the researcher can see the products of change, not the process. Essentially, what these kinds of designs do is to compare the infants’ or children’s target behavior (e.g., the interactive behavior, or the behavior shown during a task) at different ages: cross-sectional studies compare the behavior of different children, whereaslongitudinal studies compare the behavior of the same children at different ages. On the one hand, cross-sectional designs provide information on the characteristics of the target behavior in large groups at different ages. On the other hand, longitudinal designs yield important information on changes within cases, allowing one to compare those changes across different cases. Consequently, longitudinal...