The only way in which we will ever be able to truly know what a child is thinking is to get inside his/her mind. Once we get to know what causes children to do things, we will be able to connect our discoveries with others. And then we will be one step closer to understanding child development or whatever else you are experimenting with. There have been many experiments performed to try and learn what a child is thinking at different times. We have learned many things from many different scientists and without the earlier psychologists like Jean Piaget, we would not know what we are today. The psychologists can use many different research methods in order to get the information they need for their research.In an article written by Nigel Thomas and Claire O'Kane, the two psychologists discussed children's behavior. They studied what happens when a child has to make a decision and also how they react when an adult talks to them about the way they felt. In Thomas and O'Kane's experiment, children ages 8-12 were used as the subjects to gain data and all the information they could find. The research methods used here were experiments and case studies. Experiments and case studies can be very useful to examine the behavior and mental processes associated with a specific person or situation. In this case, it is the children being examined.Another possible way to do research is to do surveys. Surveys are standard sets of questions asked of a large number of participants. The problem with surveys is that questions on the standard test may lean to one of the answers and give it away. The tests are biased. Also, it could be hard to tell if someone filled out a survey seriously or just messed around with it. In order to try and cut down on the fake test takers, a question on the test could be asked a few times in different ways. If the test taker does not take the test seriously, he/she would most likely check two different answers for the same question. So although they may not care and just fill out anything on the sheet, the person giving them the test will be able to see that the survey taker put two different answers for the same question. In other words, the survey taker's survey will not be examined because the experimenter knows they did not take the test seriously. The psychologists could then simply ignore the fake survey and continue on with his/her work.In research done by Daniel J. Pilowsky, both parents and children had to take surveys. Pilowsky took 391 parents and gave them a survey and each parent had to have at least one child with him/her. The adult's survey "examined health factor, risk-related behaviors, social stress, and active drug use associated with injection drug user." (Pilowsky) The children took the survey so that the psychologists could study how the children think. Because of this survey, the experimenter was able to get percentages of the different groups of women and the way the children lived with it.In conclusion, learning how a child thinks and develops is hard to do but it is possible. With every little experiment performed, we are able to learn a lot more than before. Maybe one day we will have figured it all out and we will know what and why something is on a child's mind. Until that day, psychologists must keep working towards the goal.Pilowsky, D.J. (2001). Characteristics of Injection Use Parents Who Retain Their Children. US: Elsevier Scientific Publishers.Thomas, N. O'Kane, C. (2001). Discovering What Children Think: Connection Between Research and Practice. England: Oxford University Press.
