In this article by Eeva Kallio and Anna-Mija Pirttila-Backman, the researchers focus on a collection of research done on adult development in Europe. The article does go over a few different viewpoints including the neo-Piagetian perspectives and the Vygotskian approach to learning. Some of the issues the article covers is how people nowadays are responding to our shifting and complex way of life, how life events affect our well-being and how we think and perceive things; it talks about researcher’s insight into adult cognition, and different “domains” of life, our cognitive, social, and personality domains.
The topic of this piece is the development in adulthood, more specifically this article seems to be looking into different research projects that go over what is affecting adults’ cognition, scientific thinking, and how they are responding to societal/personal strains on their everyday life. To glean information, they use a meta-analysis approach, gathering numerous studies of previously done as well as ongoing research on this topic but each looking at it from different angles. The authors data then would be reports of acts, behaviors, and events, to get this data they would have gotten the reports from public records. To analyze this data they would have used qualitative data analysis to better understand and interpret the information assembled.
This article wasn’t as in-depth as some of the others that I have come across but I thought it was very clear and the topics of research that they went over in the piece was very interesting and were all research pieces I would be very interested in reading myself. Something that I thought was interesting to think about was the relationship between the structure of thinking and the content of thinking, which is the subject of one of the researchers mentioned in the article, Ms. Anna Kajanne. This is a subject I hadn’t ever thought of and I’m quite sure it would be an interesting read.
Kallio, E., & Pirttilä-Backman, A.-M. (2003). Developmental processes in Adulthood – European Research Perspectives. Journal of Adult Development, 10 (3), 135-138. doi:10.1023/A:1023426028821