Reserach in child development

This week we had a class on Thursday but we didin't have a lecture on Friday. I will mainly talk about what we did in class.

After learning the basic issues and theories about child development, we started learning how we study child development. First of all, we said that we use a scientific method. We added that this method has five steps:
The Scientific Method
1.Formulation of reserach question
2.Development of a hypothesis
3.Testing the hypothesis
4.Drawing conclusions about hypothesis
5.Publishing findings
Then we discussed two more methods; correlational method and the experimental method.
Correlational Method
In this method we try to see if there is a connection between behaviours, traits. For example, we can look at the relationship between intelligence and school achievement. If intelligence is increasing, so does the school achievement. Therefore we can conclude that there is positive correlation between these two.
However if we have a look at the relationship between working after school and school achievement, we will see that there is a negative correlation since one increases while the other decreases.
We also said that there is a correlation coefficient which shows the direction and the strength of these relationships. The value of the correlation coefficient is between -1 and +1. For example if this coefficient is 0.7, there is probably a good relationship. However there is still a point that we can not understand, which is casuality. We can not say if intelligence is the reason to school achievement or vice versa. Maybe there is another third factor affecting these two.
The Experimental Method
In this method, we try to do an experiment with a dependent and an indepent variable, experimental group and a control group.
In class, we gave the example of violent cartoon watching. Now let's think of this as the independent variaable and say that peer agression is the dependent variable. We get 100 kids, divide them into two groups(where everything is the same). One of the groups will be shown violent cartoons whereas the other group will be shown a normal cartoon which does not contain violence. By doing this experiment, we will see if violence increases peer agression or not.
Later, we learned about longitudinal, cross-sectional and cross-sequential research.
Longitudinal reserach: We have a group of children all the same age and we study their development in periods of time.
Cross-sectional research: We have groups of children with different ages and we look at their development processes.
Cross-sequential research: This can be considered as a combination of longitudinal and cross-sectional research.

These were the things we discussed in this week's class. Now what I have to do is to find my own research topic, form a research question and find an article about it.