ABSTRACT
The history of developmental psychology as a discipline is complex and has been written in a number of different forms ranging from the congratulatory to the critical (Bradley, 1989; Parke et al., 1994; Greene, 1997a). As is the case for psychology in general, mainstream developmental psychology in the early years of the twentieth century adopted a positivist, natural science epistemology. As the century progressed, theories emerged which competed with each other, but these theories shared common ontological and epistemological assumptions: the quarrels were not, to quote Teo (1997), at the level of meta-theory, and the underlying commitment to the assumptions and methods of the natural sciences was rarely challenged. The dependence on positivist ideology and methodology was very widespread.
