Introduction

In my Professorial Inaugural lecture entitled: Authentic University Learning, Teaching and Assessment, I defined

learning as the relatively permanent change in thinking, feeling, relating, interacting and behaving that comes about due to experience, reflection and action. Moreover, I posited that authentic university learning involved learn­ing to think, create, do things, live with others, mentor and  learning to understand. One of the aspects of learning to think that I emphasized was that which entailed learning to enquire and to be curious. I submitted that without mastering this ability, university students would be unable to learn how to generate new knowledge for either trans-forming physical and social environments or for finding new ways of adapting to changes in these environments.

In the field of Developmental Psychology, university students should be enabled to learn how to enquire and be curious. My main task in this paper is to make suggestions on how higher education institutions in Africa can promote the development of research capacity amongst staff and their students studying Developmental Psychology. I intend to do this by posing and answering the following questions

• •Who should be recipients of research capa­city building in Developmental Psycho­logy? 

• •What research capacity building skills in Developmental Psychology should African higher educational institutions foster? 

• •What strategies of research capacity build­ing in Developmental Psychology should African higher education institutions employ? 

• •What are impediments to research capacity building in Developmental Psychology in the context of African higher education institutions? 

• •What support would African higher educa­tion institutions require to promote research capacity building in Developmental Psychology? 

• •What possible pathways to building, enhan­cing and sustaining research capacity building in Developmental Psychology could African higher education institutions muster and follow? 

• •I will proceed with the rest of the paper by answering each of the above questions in the manner that follows. 

Who should be the recipients of research capacity building in Developmental Psychology?

Recipients of research capacity building in Developmental Psychology are budding, novice and developing researchers in this field. Because this field is evolving and multi­faceted (Berk, 2000), these recipients are meant, in this paper, to be undergraduate and postgraduate students in Psychology, Educa­tion, Health Sciences, Sociology, Anthropo­logy, Social Work, Law and Media Studies. In addition, the recipients include academic staff members who teach in these fields. These need research capacity building because their respective fields demand that they be in a position to produce, understand, consume and use research findings in human development.

What research capacity building skills in Developmental Psychology (i.e. human development) should African higher educational institutions foster?

By posing this question I do not insinuate that there is a complete absence of research skills on human development in all African uni­versities. What I wish to address is the need to build this capacity where it is lacking and to enhance it where it is present in various quant­ities, qualities and forms.

In my view, African universities should build and foster research capacity in human devel­opment that pertains to three aspects. The first of these is on skills to conduct developmental research on children, the youth and adults. The second aspect pertains to the dissemina­tion of findings of this research. The third aspect is the use of the findings in theory appraisal and development, further research, teaching, policy formulation and in advocacy activities that are undertaken to promote the well-being and welfare of communities. Moreover, these research skills should include abilities to source funds for conducting research on human development.

There are two main research capacities I wish to highlight under the skill of how to conduct developmental psychology research. The first capacity is the asking of important theoretical and applied research questions. From my teaching and research experience, I have come across many postgraduate students and young colleagues who experience severe difficulties in conceptualizing and formulating research problems. Although in a number of cases these difficulties persist even after instruction in research methods, their main cause is the failure by budding researchers to distinguish between research problems in human development that are driven by curiosity, lack of evidence and information for resolving conceptual and practice-related conflicts, and other problems of a social, health, economic, adversity and disaster nature. In illustrating why the latter problems are not research problems, Shank (2006, p. 102) states:

If you have a point to prove, or an axe to grind, or an old wound to salve, or a message to deliver, then there are other legitimate ways to pursue these ends. Do not disguise them as research (emphasis added). This is not to say that research cannot prove a point, or grind an axe, or salve a wound, or deliver a message. But these secondary and incidental effects should only occur along the way towards resolving a matter of curiosity.  

The point to note here is that research in any field is about asking questions whose answers provide evidence and suggest new ways of perceiving and understanding issues, matters and phenomena under investigation. In De­velopmental Psychology, such research should for instance, elucidate the unfolding of reasoning, relating and problem-solving capacities of children, adolescents and adults. In addition, the research should clarify the influence of social, cultural, material and physical environments on the intellectual and social-relational development of persons (Zimba, 2002, 2008a, 2008b).

Difficulties in formulating research problems also arise from the failure to locate enquiry efforts in developmental theory (Greig and Taylor, 1999; Miller, J. 2002; Zimba, 2002) and the lack of a genuine need to understand the nature and meaning of human develop­ment (Kagan, 1984; Berk, 2000). Moreover, as will be elaborated on in a later section of this paper, a failure to ask appropriate research questions in human development is in some cases caused by novice researchers’ inability to apprehend the point that research questions are formulated from a variety of theoretical and paradigmatic vantage points and world-views. To instantiate this point, more than two and a half decades ago, Bronfenbrenner (1979, p.3) introduced his seminal work on the ecology of human development: experiments by nature and design by stating the following:

In this volume, I offer a new theoretical perspective for research in human development. The perspective is new in its conception of the developing person, of the environment, and especially of the evolving interaction between the two. Thus development is defined in this work as a lasting change in the way in which a person perceives and deals with his environ­ment.  

Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model of human development provides researchers with a theoretical framework within which to anchor their studies. Well-known theories on human development by scholars such as Piaget, Kohl­berg, Erikson, Vygotsky, Bruner and Maslow also provide conceptual anchoring blueprints for researchers within which to interpret their research results. This allows them to demon­strate the manner in which their research ex­tends frontiers of knowledge.

To ask good research questions on the devel­opment of children’s moral reasoning for ex­ample, one needs to be immersed in and make use of preferred theoretical perspectives (Eckensberger and Zimba, 1997, Miller, J., 2002). These may be positivist or constructivist or structuralist or contextual or universalistic in nature (Kegan, 1982; Hatch, 2000). As we are aware, the choice of particu­lar theoretical perspectives or a combination of them in which to frame research questions depends on the purpose of the research to be un­dertaken, the ‘goodness of fit’ of the preferred per­spective (s) to this purpose and the type of knowledge and understanding being sought.

The message I wish to communicate at this point is that for budding researchers to build, promote and enhance research capacity, African university academic programmes on human development should enable them to ask questions that are informed by the need for understanding and meaning, paradigmatic and theoretical perspect­ives and curiosity.

The second research capacity under the skill of conducting research is on how to design and execute research studies in human development. The main point here is that academic programmes in human development should empower budding researchers to anchor their research plans on clearly understood research approaches, such as quantitative and qualitative research ap­proaches. It is imperative that researchers become competent through initial formal training in designing research studies in human development that reflect the epistemo­logical foundations and problems of either of these approaches (Aptekar and Stöcklin, 1997; Denzin and Lincoln, 2005; Guba and Lincoln, 2005; Lincoln and Guba, 1985; Patton, 1990). In order to avoid the development of naïve positions regarding universal children and universal conditions under which they are raised, contextual, universal and ideological aspects of human development research should also be apprehended when designing the studies. It should not be assumed that researchers would acquire this ability informally on their own as they conduct research studies.

For instance, developing researchers in human development should instead be formally and rigorously exposed to quantitative and qualitative research methods that would require them to obey systematic ways of building or constructing knowledge. They should be enabled to locate human and other sources of information, construct various reliable and valid research instruments and gather quantitative and qualitative data. Moreover, they should be empowered to analyse different types of research data collected under either of these approaches and prepare meaningful research reports. It should be noted that nowadays data analysis needs to take advantage of ICT applications. This means that in addition to usual SPSS packages, students of human development research should be exposed to various computer-assisted ways of analysing quantitative and qualitative data.  

Concerning the skill of how to disseminate research findings on human development, I wish to focus on empowering developing re­searchers to learn how to prepare research-based manuscripts for publication, how to prepare presentations for public consumption and how to share research findings with col­leagues and policy makers at professional gatherings and at official meetings. Many uni­versities in Africa do not normally include these aspects in formal programmes on human development. This is unfortunate because after graduation from universities, employers, the public and professional bodies expect products of the academic programmes to exhibit competent performance in these areas. My argument here is that if we do not wish universities to remain esoteric in the area of human development knowledge creation, we should train people in the field in a manner that they are able to meaningfully use, com­municate, disseminate and share this know­ledge with others. When this is not done, the research knowledge becomes obscure, inac­cessible and to a large extent useless. To avoid all this, deliberate efforts should be made through mentoring and modelling to involve developing researchers in co-authorship of journal articles and conference papers. They should also be involved in the process of pre­paring conference and public presentations. This should include learning how to electron­ically put together information in the form of text, tables, spreadsheets, figures, photographs and other images and use the power point fa­cility to present it. In order for some of us in Africa to build capacity in others to do this we need to liberate ourselves from electronic phobia. We should learn to go beyond the overhead projector and join others in the e-learning, e-publishing and e-communication age. We may not be rich enough to be passen­gers on space ships to the moon but we can operate in cyberspace for the benefit of devel­oping scholarship in human development per­taining to the skill of how to use human de­velopment research findings in applied ways, I wish to focus on teaching, further research, theory and knowledge development and ad­vocacy. Before the research findings are translated into teaching episodes, they should be codified into human development manu­als, text books and modules (Santrock, 1997; Miller P., 1983). The point here is that devel­oping researchers should not stop at learning how to generate human development know­ledge. They should further be enabled to write and publish teaching materials based on their human development research findings. One major problem in a number of African universities is that academics in general and researchers in human development in particu­lar are not provided with the means to write and publish materials for use in their teaching. For instance, in addition to lacking capacity, a number of them become so buried in teaching, administrative chores and moonlighting that they have little time left for serious scholarly pursuits.

In order to build theory out of human devel­opment research findings, developing re­searchers should learn how to use these find­ings in generating new questions requiring further research. The skill implicated here is that of reviewing and critiquing other re­searchers’ work as a way of identifying gaps in knowledge and attempting to fill in these gaps with fresh research knowledge. As many of us are aware, researchers did not automatically come across the ability to pre­pare insightful reviews. They were instructed at some point how to do so. My contention here is that many African universities run academic programmes in human development that do not prepare developing researchers in a way that enables them to intelligently critique other researchers’ work.

Another ability that should be acquired by developing researchers in human development is that of using research findings in advocacy activities. On many occasions human development researchers are called upon to either produce research evidence or employ their expertise in helping the public make in­formed decisions regarding the welfare, well-being and ‘well-becoming’ of children, the youth and the elderly (Dawes and Donald, 2000; Zimba, R. F. and Zimba, E., 2004; Zimba and Otaala, 1993). An example of an advocacy stance is the following:

The quantity and quality of services in Africa remain the lowest and the poorest in the world and underline an unfortunate tendency to inef­ficiency and decline. The services tend to be oriented toward children and adults to the det­riment of adolescents, or the services only marginally refer to them. Even where they are meant for the young, adolescents do not have easy access to them (Nsamenang, 2002).

Another example of advocating for children comes from the work of Aptekar and Stöcklin (1997, pp. 379-380). Based on their work on children in particularly difficult circum­stances, they state:

Issues of cultural relativism cannot be divorced from the general study of child abuse. Abused children are victims of behaviours which inflict great harm, and intense pain or suffering. These behaviours raise questions about basic moral values, and possibly universal, or at least widespread, standards of human conduct towards children. Are there some childrearing practices that are universally reprehensible?

One concept of ideal childhood sees the child as innocent, in need of and deserving constant attention. To incorporate this concept of chil­dren across cultures, notably when asserting allegiance to the United Nations (U.N.) Con­vention on the Rights of the Child, poses problems, because the “best interests of the child” are defined almost entirely by adults, who may ignore the ties between the concep­tion of rights, cultural values, and socio-economic situations.  

For Nsamenang, Aptekar and Stöcklin to ar­rive at their respective assessments, they did not only apply research findings but they also most probably used their ability to advocate for African adolescents and children in gener­al. It is this ability that I think should be ac­quired by developing researchers in human development in several African universities. My view is that through critical discourse and analytic dialogue, the ability should be delib­erately taught in courses on human develop­ment. This should be done not only because research is not neutral but also because re­search should be engaged in for social utility purposes. This is particularly crucial in Africa where studies in human development should concurrently serve pure and applied research functions.

Without funds research in human develop-ment cannot be easily conducted. These funds have to be raised from public and private sources. Individuals engaged in fund raising should have the ability to do so. My position is that the ability of preparing research grants should be acquired in courses on human development, in order to avoid negative effects that follow when it is not acquired. One of the negative effects is the frustration that ensues when researchers fail to undertake research projects in human development due to lack of funds. Notice that I am placing the onus of procuring research funds on researchers and not solely on government and universities.

What strategies of research capacity building in developmental psychology should African higher education institu­tions employ?

The strategies I present in this section pertain to formal instruction, joint institutional re­search programmes in human development, research centres in human development, in-service training activities, collaboration amongst local and between local and interna­tional colleagues on human development re­search projects, networking amongst interest groups specializing in particular research issues in human development, consultancies and sponsored research projects on human development and conferences on human de­velopment research methods.

I am aware that a number of African uni­versities provide formal courses in human de­velopment research. These tend to be special­ized and are usually housed in departments of psychology or educational psychology. Be­cause of the multidisciplinary nature of hu­man development, I suggest that these courses be jointly offered by academics from fields that I referred to in the preceding section. I know that cutting across boundaries in this manner is difficult but I think the time has come for us to put aside our territorial defences and work towards the understanding of the development of human beings who are not compartmentalized. My vision is that of human development research programmes that are jointly mounted and run by psychologists, educational psychologists, sociologists, medical doctors, lawyers, academics in media studies, anthropologists and professionals in social work.

To learn from one another and to share re­sources, I propose that African universities build and enhance the practice of running joint research programmes in human development amongst themselves and other institutions from elsewhere. Such programmes should be built on mutual trust, respect for each others’ expertise and local wisdom. As Africans, we should recognize our collective human devel­opment research expertise, resources, strengths, wisdom, and build on them for the benefit of the development of the field and the growth of our understanding of developing persons. We can employ the Association of African Universities to facilitate this.

I have come across research centres dedicated to human development. For instance, in the 1970s the department of psychology at the University of Zambia used to run a prolific re­search unit in human development. Out of the unit came instructive, insightful and scholarly research reports and monographs on various human development issues. I propose that as capacity building tools, research centres in human development be established at African universities where they do not exist and be strengthened where they already exist. One main advantage of such centres is that they tend to attract human and material resources for research from within countries, from within the continent and from Europe, the Americas, Asia, the Middle East and the Caribbean.

In-service training workshops, seminars, short courses and interest group meetings would promote human development research capacity building by making use of mentoring. Local, regional and visiting international senior researchers in human development could act as resource persons when facilitating these in-service training activities. To ensure that these activities play the role of capacity building, African universities need to create, where they do not exist, structures and conducive academic environments for such capacity building activities.. In addition, interest groups of researchers could organize regular meetings at which issues in human development research would be discussed.

Collaboration, networking, consultancies, sponsored research projects and conferences on human development research methods are other strategies that could promote capacity building in human development research. As is the case for in-service training, a number of African universities should facilitate the functioning of these strategies by enabling researchers in human development to use them. They could do this by including in their institutional budgets, agreements with other institutions and funding agencies financial needs for conducting human development and other types of university research.

What are impediments to research capacity building in developmental psychology in the context of African higher education institutions?

It is naïve to believe that the strategies for ca­pacity building that were discussed in the preceding section would be applied without problems. There are in fact impediments to this process. Lack of institutional support to undertake research in human development, lack of academic programmes focusing on research methods in human development, lack of opportunities to apply academically sound research approaches and methods, lack of projects requiring thorough in-depth pure research studies and the problem of interfer­ence in setting human development research agenda are some of the impediments I would like to highlight.

In a number of African universities, lack of institutional support for developing research capacity in human development is in the form of constraints imposed on academic members of staff. These include too much teaching, too much administrative work, too much trans­formation work and politicking and the inevit­able practice of basing teaching on secondary information contained in books without local credibility. In some cases, these constraints are tolerated under the guise of promoting ef­ficiency and cost effectiveness. What is not realized is the fact that overworked and de­moralized staff have their energy so depleted that they have little zeal and motivation left for learning how to undertake high quality research in human development or in any other field for that matter.

At some African universities, the other impe-diment is the non-availability of high quality undergraduate and postgraduate multidiscip­linary courses on human development re­search. This prevents many students from de­veloping capacity in this kind of research and from understanding academically sound re­search approaches and methods.

The lack of opportunities to participate in re­search projects demanding the application of advanced research methods also impedes the development of research capacity that would enable its recipients to undertake research in human development with understanding. This problem is displayed when members of staff only  have opportunities to undertake surveys and situation analyses –  usually in a terrible hurry. In the context of a scarcity of research funds, developing researchers in human devel­opment usually have no choice in identifying problems of their interest and basing their re­search studies on these problems. They are given research problems to work on by project funders. This means that they do not set the research agenda. Such imposed research agen­das may however, have nothing to do with re­search capacity building in human develop­ment.

What support would African higher education institutions require to promote research capacity building in developmental psychology?

To mitigate the impediments highlighted in the preceding section, institutional support is the first type of support that a number of African universities need. Universities need support to create academic environments in which their staff in any field – including hu­man development – are freed from constrain­ing tasks and given opportunities to continue learning how to do research and grow in their understanding of human development. To create such environments, universities need adequate human and material resources. These should include specialized human develop-ment research structures, infrastructure and equipment. Research itself can be used to generate some of these resources. For public universities, the bulk of these resources will have to be supplied by the state. In Africa, this has been a problematic affair (Ekong, 1999). Ajayi, Goma and Johnson (1996, p. 155) express the problem in the following way:

The fact that public funds do not flow freely enough to meet the planned or desired targets should not make African universities to simply throw up their arms in despair. On the contrary, they must take up the task of finding ways of pushing aside the obstacles in order to make room for academic innovation and creativeness, despite constraints on resources. This might become the essential challenge for Africa’s institutions of higher education in the years to come.

For a number of us who have experienced the blunt of scarcity, this is easier said than done. The message though is clear. To promote ca­pacity building in human development re­search, a number of African universities need to mobilize human and material resources. One strategy for doing this is that of letting universities which lack capacity in resource mobilization to learn from those which have a knack for it. For instance, the University of Namibia or the University of Zambia can learn from the University of Cape Town about effective strategies of resource mobilization. Some African universities can also create conducive conditions for research capacity building to thrive by designing and implementing academic programmes on hu­man development research. As pointed out earlier, these should be multidisciplinary in nature. Support for the establishment or the enhancement of such programmes should fall within the ambit of overall university planning.

In order to promote capacity building through providing developing researchers opportunit­ies to participate in real human development research, research centres in this field should be established where they do not exist. Support for this to take place should be soli­cited from both public and private sources. I wish to suggest here that African business houses should be sensitized to financially support ventures such as this.

Another type of support is that of providing developing researchers with opportunities to prepare and publish their research findings. This support should be in the form of provid­ing facilities in which researchers can learn to write manuscripts, edit them, have them refer­eed and published. African universities that do not have these facilities may use their own re­sources to establish and run them.

Academic and political leadership in support of capacity building in human development is also needed. Management in some African universities should be sensitized about the need to put in place and maintain facilities for research in general and for human develop­ment research in particular. In order to mobil­ize resources political support is required. Key policy makers in education, health and finance should be made aware of the importance of research in human development and the need to support it in concrete ways. To obtain this support, universities should engage in vigor­ous communication and marketing campaigns. These campaigns should be informed by the use of human development research findings in social-economic decision-making and so­cial practice.

What possible pathways to building, enhancing and sustaining research capacity building in developmental psychology could African higher education institutions muster and follow?

Pathways lead to destinations. In today’s world one may reach the destination of the da Vinci Code, the gospel according to Judas Iscariot, the satanic verses, gay marriages and postmodernism. In a nutshell, one might reach the destination of a deconstructed world where everything is under scrutiny and in question. Alternatively, one may reach the destination where ‘another world is possible’ (Chomsky, 2005). This is a world that is more democratic, more socially and economically just, a world in which the popular will triumphs over the hegemony of the rich and the powerful, a world where we predomin­antly see with the eyes of our hearts – the eyes “that are not concerned with appearances but essences”, the eyes that enable us to become more loving, forgiving, humane and generous (Tutu, 2004).

In human development our destination, in my view, should be that of understanding the evolvement, transformation and development of thought, feeling, emotion and behaviour. As an applied psychologist, I would go amiss if I stop here. I must include that the quest for such understanding should aim at bringing about environments and conditions in which human beings develop and experience fulfil­ment, worth, being of value, love, care, em­pathy, competence, a sense of achievement, forgiveness, humility and humanity. All this  should include the gist of the World Social Forum’s theme which stipulates that ‘another world is possible’.

To reach this destination through human de­velopment research, I propose six bipolar pathways. These are disciplinary vs. mul­tidisciplinary, faculty-based vs. centre-based, constructivist vs. de-constructivist, life span vs. child or youth development, client-centred vs. subject-matter centred and indigenous vs. ‘mainstream’ human development research programmes. Based on preferred theoretical and paradigmatic thrusts, the pathway foci of human development research programmes can be opted for. I propose that African universities opt for divergent and multifaceted human development research pathways that are multidisciplinary, constructivist, life span in orientation, client-centred and subject-matter centred, as well as indigenous and ‘mainstream’ in approach. In my view these pathways could yield the kind of under-standing that would enable researchers to travel towards the ‘another world is possible’ destination of human development.

Although some pathways are self-explanatory, the client-centred one may not. By this path­way, I mean a human development research programme that is based on specific clients. Examples of these are children in extremely difficult circumstances, orphans, marginalized children, adolescents, abused children, child soldiers, vulnerable children and the elderly.

Conclusion

This paper sought to answer six questions per­taining to capacity building in human develop­ment/developmental psychology research. In response to the questions, the nature of re­search skills to be built, strategies for develop­ing the skills and impediments to their devel­opment were discussed. Moreover, in addition to identifying the recipients of the capacity building, support needed by some African uni­versities to effect the capacity building was outlined. As a way of creating a vision for the future, non-linear and divergent pathways that African universities could employ when de­veloping sustainable programmes in human development research were proposed. It is hoped that some messages that resonate with existing efforts to create, enhance and sustain capacity in human development research in African universities have been communicated.

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