An Introduction to Developmental Psychology as Related to Poverty and Social Exclusion.

This paper discusses the effects of poverty according to our current knowledge about human development. The discussion is based in part on a study of "Poverty and Children" which was conducted by an interdisciplinary research group at the Faculty of Education of Hokkaido University, and on other findings from historical thesis and non-fiction sources. Specifically, the investigations were concerned with how poverty affects child development in their living environment, at each stage of development from the fetal period through middle childhood. Most past developmental psychology studies in Japan have excluded children and parents in "absolute poverty." However, considering Japan's growing numbers of poor households, researchers may have already come across children and parents in "relative poverty" in their experiments or observations, without being aware of this poverty. This paper suggests that researchers should become more conscious of poverty and social exclusion, and proposes redefinitions of the concepts of "relative poverty" and "absolute poverty" from a developmental point of view adapted from the social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]