ABSTRACT
The study of blind children’s development constitutes a unique opportunity to study the effect of vision on development. Thus, congenitally blind children without added handicaps allow us to study how lack of vision affects human development. In spite of its potential value, the research with blind children has suffered from a lack of methodological rigour. From a theoretical point of view, the study of blind children’s development has been approached from different perspectives. Longitudinal studies are labour intensive and expensive; inevitably, the few longitudinal studies carried out with blind children have usually been small in scale. There are other methodological pitfalls in a number of studies involving blind children. A methodological issue in research with blind children deals with the comparability of the behaviours observed in blind and sighted children. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
