CASE STUDY

Case Study

Case Study

Background of the Case Study

Hyun-Ki's family emigrated from Korea 3 years ago and now lives in a large city on the west Coast. His parents moved to this location because they had relatives living in the same cit: and they wanted the economic and educational opportunities that the- believed the United States could afford their family Both parents immediately found work in their relatives' small business. Attend the local public high school, and they are diligent, academically advanced students.

How does your knowledge of the topics of sex role development and peer group processes contribute to your understanding of Hyun-Kis situation?

Hyun-Ki a filth grader, is the youngest child. He is quiet and socially reserved. He is also physically slight for his age. His heavily accented English is somewhat difficult to understand, and he is sensitive about his speech. Consequently he does not often volunteer to answer Questions in class. When he enters the classroom, students snicker and deride him. Students make fun of his speech and his reserved ways. When he walks down the hallway to his locker, he is aware of the disparaging looks he gets from some groups of students. HyunKi has a Korean friend whom he sees every Sunday at church. The two boys enjoy spending time together after the service. Hyun-Ki and his friend share art interest in nature and hiking. Hyun-Ki wishes he had a friend like this in his own classroom. (Jarvis 1999)

First, there are normative age-graded influences: those correlated highly with age, such as physical maturation, commencement of education, and parents' death. Then, there are normative, history-graded influences, that is, historical events that influence entire age cohorts-economic depressions, epidemics, wars, social movements and Hyun has the same problem. (Humphries 2000)

How could you help Hyun-Ki parents and teachers understand the situation? How would you suggest they help him?

For developmental psychologists, there exist vital questions regarding the origins and early manifestation of human abilities that can only be answered by investigating the abilities of infants, sometimes very young infants at that and Hyun is passing through this stage. In addition to questions about the perceptual, cognitive, and social capacities of the newborn, important questions exist regarding the processes underlying the exciting developments in motor skill, memory capacity, and perceptual, emotional, social, and cognitive ability that we see in infancy because his family left him. The beginnings of communication and language are also detected in infancy and that time he must faced such thing of problem. All these developments are of interest in their own right, but are also significant for what they may tell us about the origins and nature of later ability. Additionally, from an applied standpoint, HyunKi is growing emphasis on early detection of developmental problems and interventions that may alleviate or even prevent their emergence. These questions and concerns are not new, but their solutions require adequate techniques for studying infant ability. (Brookfield 1999)

One thing that makes the field of infancy so exciting today is the fact that investiga­tive ...