Week 1 Post 1

I've taken a number of online courses but this is the first course ever that I've had to do a blog.  I'm excited to see how this blogging will benefit our learning in this psychology class.  Hopefully, bouncing ideas off of each other and just listening to what other people have to say will help us build a good learning environment with our online class.

It was hard for me to answer the discussion question whether or not developmental psychology is a subjective or objective investigation.  As a biology major, I am biased to believe that in order for a conclusion of a study to be valid, it must be based off of empirical data collected from a scientific study.  When thinking about subjective investigation, in the biology world, there is no such thing.  Biologists cannot simply look at something and make generalizations.  When reading chapter one in the textbook, we learned about different types of studies, such as observation, longitudinal research, and cross sequential research.  With those types of research studies, the investigation is subjective.  The psychologists study people by watching and recording their findings.  After studying a large number of people, the psychologist can make a generalization about a certain behavior.  In most types of biology, we cannot make generalizations and most conclusions must come about from empirical data.  When thinking about developmental psychology, I suppose a lot of it can involve subjective investigation but the biologist in me believes valid conclusions should come from empirical data.