ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines some ways in which a rapprochement might come about between the systems in which researchers and practitioners operate. It argues that this should be achieved through the expansion of service-based research. The chapter identifies several features prevalent in current research that increase its isolation from practice and blunt its effectiveness in adding to our knowledge about child development. Psychology like the social sciences seems to have accepted a rather romantic notion of the lone researcher developing an original approach in splendid isolation. The image of the lone researcher is set during undergraduate training, when each student has to find a different topic for their dissertation, and is further reinforced by our Master and Doctoral degrees. Developmental researchers must break free of the mentality inherited from the physical sciences – that they can prove the causes of new behaviours, when at best they can only establish probabilities.
