Psychologists Study Social Development

DR. PAMELA TROTMAN REID
is a developmental psychologist, a researcher, and a university professor.

Developmental psychologists look at the changes that occur across an entire lifetime. It is a fantastic area because you can do so many different things. You can focus on language development, for example, and study why children's speech may not reflect their thinking. You can look at adolescents and the problems they have in establishing identity. Or you can examine families, from how they use discipline to how they develop attitudes.

There is also a growing interest in adult development and aging, partly because of the graying of America and partly because we are beginning to realize that we don't stop growing when we reach puberty. Instead, we continue to change and develop in many areas all our lives. Developmental psychologists can investigate adult learning issues at the work place, or the effects of aging on cognition.

I was always interested in science; even as a child I had played with chemistry sets. At Howard University in Washington, DC, I majored in chemistry and thought about becoming a medical doctor. But because so many of my friends were taking psychology as an elective, I did, too. Psychology, I learned, is about both science and the application of science to people. I fell in love with the subject, switched my major to psychology, and then went to graduate school and earned my doctorate in educational psychology.

Today, as a researcher and a professor in psychology at the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York, I specialize in social development, with my primary interest in the effect of children's gender and culture. I get a great deal of pleasure from teaching and research.

In some of my studies, I have studied why girls act in certain ways and why boys behave in different ways. One small body of research had suggested that women and girls are typically more interested in babies than men and boys are. But all this research had been conducted on White children and adults.

So I looked at both Black and White children, and found no difference between African American boys and girls! In 8- to 10-year-old middle-class children, the White girls liked the babies (they looked at them, touched them, and smiled at them); the African American girls liked the babies; and even the African American boys liked the babies. Only the White boys appeared uninterested in the babies. As often happens, the research led to more questions. Now instead of asking why girls are more interested than boys in babies, the question became, Are we socializing White boys so that they don't like babies?

Currently I'm doing research with children who live in shelters because their parents are homeless. I'm learning about the stresses they undergo so that, perhaps, we can help them learn how some children cope and others do not. For me, the important thing is that in psychology, you can research the questions that you are interested in, not only those that someone else has posed.

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