This chapter can serve either as a starting point or a recharging point for instructors who are preparing to teach research methods and/or statistics at the college or graduate level. Using empirical work and experience, I’ll discuss the importance of these classes and then provide a list of what I perceive to be the most important recommendations and biggest challenges related to teaching these courses. Because so many classes include projects, I have dedicated half of the recommendations and challenges to the ones that involve student projects. It is my hope that a person reading this takes away a set of ideas and feels empowered to teach these courses well. For all the challenges, teaching these classes can be rewarding for the instructor and transformative for the student.

No form of biological life exists independent of other lives across its ontogeny. Among humans, mutually beneficial and adaptive (functional) development occurs when (1) an individual acts in ways that contribute to the well-being of the person’s social ecology, including the other individuals in the social world and the social institutions of this context, and (2) the social world supports the positive and healthy development of the individual. Within dynamic, relational developmental systems–based models of human development, these dynamic individual ⬄ individual/social institution relationships constitute adaptive developmental regulations and are the essence of prosociality. We present a dynamic model of the links among prosociality, positive youth development (PYD), and character virtue development. We present the theoretical rationale for the hypothesis that the enhancement of character virtue development through specific character education programs can provide the contextual conditions that, when aligned with an individual’s attributes of thriving, increase the likelihood that PYD and prosociality will be linked among youth.

As social and behavioral scientists, it is of fundamental importance to understand the factors that drive the behaviors that we measure. Careful design is thus required to minimize the influence of extraneous factors. Yet, we often overlook one major class of such extraneous factors – those related to us, the experimenters. Experimenter effects can potentially arise at every step in the research process – from the selection of hypotheses, to interacting with research participants in ways that might alter their behavior, to biases in data interpretation. While such experimenter-driven effects often occur without notice, and without ill intent, they nonetheless threaten the replicability and generalizability of research. In this chapter, we discuss when and how such effects arise, preventative measures that can be taken to reduce their influence, and methods for accounting for such effects, when appropriate.

This chapter discusses the key elements involved when building a study. Planning empirical studies presupposes a decision about whether the major goal of the study is confirmatory (i.e., tests of hypotheses) or exploratory in nature (i.e., development of hypotheses or estimation of effects). Focusing on confirmatory studies, we discuss problems involved in obtaining an appropriate sample, controlling internal and external validity when designing the study, and selecting statistical hypotheses that mirror the substantive hypotheses of interest. Building a study additionally involves decisions about the to-be-employed statistical test strategy, the sample size required by this strategy to render the study informative, and the most efficient way to achieve this so that study costs are minimized without compromising the validity of inferences. Finally, we point to the many advantages of study preregistration before data collection begins.

A strong participant recruitment plan is a major determinant of the success of human subjects research. The plan adopted by researchers will determine the kinds of inferences that follow from the collected data and how much it will cost to collect. Research studies with weak or non-existent recruitment plans risk recruiting too few participants or the wrong kind of participants to be able to answer the question that motivated them. This chapter outlines key considerations for researchers who are developing recruitment plans and provides suggestions for how to make recruiting more efficient.

Emotion motivates prosocial behavior, and interest in this topic usually focuses on empathy. This chapter explores other emotions that can also motivate prosocial action and the research directions and practical implications that follow. It opens with consideration of two perspectives on the association of emotions and prosocial behavior offered by Malti and Thompson, and then proceeds to discuss research concerning the following prosocial emotions: happiness derived from assisting another, moral pride derived from prosociality, indignation over observed harm, empathy and sympathy, and gratitude. Guilt as a moral and possibly prosocial emotion is also discussed. The shared element of these prosocial emotions is that they derive from a personal connection between an observer and another’s emotional experience. An overview of the research on emotional development and emotion regulation follows to explore how this connection emerges developmentally. The conclusion summarizes much-needed areas for further research along with the implications of these ideas.

Early forms of empathy and sharing appear before the first birthday. In the second year, toddlers cooperate and help or comfort others, as they begin to recognize other people’s needs. The different types of early prosocial behavior are not necessarily correlated with each other or with measures of infants’ temperament. Individual differences and gender differences in prosocial behavior begin to emerge in early childhood, when prosocial behavior becomes associated with children’s developing skills and their social understanding.

This chapter focuses on informed consent, the cornerstone of conducting ethical human subjects research. It presents a brief history of the origins of informed consent to research and reviews codes, guidelines, and regulations that have been established in response to ethical violations carried out in the name of science. The chapter reviews the essential elements of consent (i.e., intelligence, knowingness, and voluntariness) and discusses challenges that researchers may encounter within each of these areas. Importantly, it approaches consent as an ongoing process rather than a one-time-event and presents practical and empirically supported strategies that researchers can apply to assess and enhance individuals’ capacity, understanding, and autonomy as it pertains to research participation. Additional topics discussed include assent to research that involves children, electronic and multimedia consent, and consent to research using biospecimens.

Prosocial behavior plays a crucial role in the social success of children and adolescents. This chapter reviews research on the relations between prosocial behavior and features of youth’s relationships with peers, both within groups and dyadically within friendships. We also discuss possible theoretical mechanisms that may link prosocial behavior to functioning with peers, highlighting lingering questions and future directions to guide research in this area.

Research on prosociality through the lens of developmental psychology and related disciplines is recent in human history, starting just over 50 years ago when I began my career. It sounds like a long time, but it was not, when considered in terms of human evolution. It was exciting to get in on the ground floor. This transition to theory testing, data collection, combinations of methods, and interdisciplinary work created a niche for me to study the development of empathy and prosocial behavior. It also allowed for the study of several other aspects of prosociality that are well reflected in this volume. Malti and Davidov have created a remarkable, scholarly volume that testifies to all we have learned in a short period of time. Early students are now masters of their own innovative work with their own colleagues and students. As an epilogue to the volume, I share here with the reader some of my recollections, insights, and reflections on this body of knowledge and work that is so close to my heart.

This chapter provides an integrative review of the literature on prosocial development across adolescence. Despite core developmental theories addressing biological, cognitive, moral, social, and cultural related domains, our understanding of prosocial development across adolescence in non-Western countries is still quite limited. This chapter summarizes prosocial development work in culturally diverse samples that has application to migrant and minoritized adolescents who navigate a myriad of stressors while pursing work in other countries around the world and when socially integrating into majority communities. These examples highlight the need to deepen the current literature of prosocial development and shed light into more inclusive models of development and on culturally diverse adolescents

Children and adolescents spend a great deal of time with a variety of media, raising the important question of whether media might influence the socialization of children. Although copious research has found consistent links between violent media content and children’s aggression, research has also found that prosocial media influences the development of prosocial behavior for both children and adolescents. Thus, in this chapter we review theoretical justifications for why and how prosocial media content impacts young people, and then synthesize existing research on the effects of different mediums of prosocial media on child outcomes. This review includes traditional media (e.g., TV, movies, video games, music, books) and new media (e.g., cell phones, tablets, social media). We then discuss the policy implications of links between prosocial media and prosocial behavior, and provide important avenues for future research.

In this chapter, we will discuss the “big four” approaches to qualitative analysis – qualitative content analysis, thematic analysis, grounded theory, and discourse analysis – before briefly describing four additional commonly used approaches. Some of these approaches are empirical, either theory-driven or inductive, identifying observable concepts in the data. In others, research is from a social constructionist perspective, incorporating the researcher’s interpretation as an essential part of the analysis. Some methods, such as thematic analysis, can be used for either approach. This epistemological range means that, as with quantitative analyses, it is essential to select the appropriate method for analyzing the data, and the rigorous procedures involved in qualitative methodology must be followed meticulously.

In this chapter, we review developmental theories of prosocial behavior. We begin by briefly discussing the ways in which the grand theories of development have been used to explain prosocial development, as well as some of the major biologically oriented arguments. We then present a comprehensive model of prosocial behavior that includes the multiple individual and contextual factors that contribute to prosocial actions in children. Next, we discuss the multidimensional nature of young children’s prosocial behavior – a topic of considerable research in the last decade – and suggest ways that the comprehensive model is relevant for prosocial development in very young children.

This chapter provides an introduction to the topic of this handbook: prosociality and its development across the first two decades of life, as well as causes, correlates, and consequences across the lifespan. We begin by providing conceptualizations of prosociality and derive an understanding of what prosociality is, and how it is different from related constructs. We then describe core theoretical accounts on prosocial development. Selected historical attempts to understand prosociality in humans are reviewed, along with historical turning points in early theorizing on prosocial development. Last, a brief summary of select mechanisms underlying the development of prosociality is presented.

In this chapter, we discuss the logic and practice of quasi-experimentation. Specifically, we describe four quasi-experimental designs – one-group pretest–posttest designs, non-equivalent group designs, regression discontinuity designs, and interrupted time-series designs – and their statistical analyses in detail. Both simple quasi-experimental designs and embellishments of these simple designs are presented. Potential threats to internal validity are illustrated along with means of addressing their potentially biasing effects so that these effects can be minimized. In contrast to quasi-experiments, randomized experiments are often thought to be the gold standard when estimating the effects of treatment interventions. However, circumstances frequently arise where quasi-experiments can usefully supplement randomized experiments or when quasi-experiments can fruitfully be used in place of randomized experiments. Researchers need to appreciate the relative strengths and weaknesses of the various quasi-experiments so they can choose among pre-specified designs or craft their own unique quasi-experiments.

This chapter describes some of the issues to be considered when dealing with longitudinal data. Longitudinal data can be defined as data gathered on a set of units over multiple time periods. Longitudinal data can be collected either prospectively or retrospectively, and data can be either qualitative or quantitative. Different ways of deriving repeated observations generate the three main types of longitudinal design: repeated cross-sectional surveys, panel surveys, and retrospective surveys. The world of longitudinal research is thus very heterogeneous. This chapter provides both a summary of advantages and disadvantages of each longitudinal design and some guidelines for authors and researchers.