Question

What is the difference between "continuity" and "discontinuity?" Please give an example within your 300 word reply.

Answer 1

regard to continuity and discontinuity, descriptions or explanations of development can involve quantitative or qualitative changes. Descriptively, quantitative changes involve differences in how much (or how many) of something exists. For example, in adolescence, quantitative changes occur in such areas as height and weight since there is an adolescent growth spurt, and these changes are often interpreted as resulting from quantitative increases in the production of growth-stimulating hormones

descriptive qualitative changes involve differences in what exists, in what sort of phenomenon is present. The emergence in adolescence of a drive state never before present in life—that is, a reproductively mature sexual drive—and the emergence in adolescence of new and abstract thought capabilities not present in younger people—that is, in Jean Piaget’s terms, formal operations—are instances of changes interpreted as arising from qualitative alterations in the person. It is believed that the person is not just “more of the same”; rather, the person is seen as having a new quality or characteristic.

Explanations of development also can vary in regard to whether one accounts for change by positing quantitative changes (e.g., increases in the amounts of growth hormone present in the bloodstream) or by positing a new reason for behaviors (e.g., an infant’s interactions in his or her social world are predicated on the need to establish a sense of basic trust in the world, whereas an adolescent’s social interactions involve the need to establish a sense of identity, or a self-definition). In other words, it is possible to offer an explanatory discontinuous interpretation of development involving either quantitative or qualitative change.

For instance, when particular types of explanatory discontinuous qualitative changes are said to be involved in development, the critical periods hypothesis is often raised, as in Erik Erikson’s work. The point is that on the basis of adherence to a particular theory of development (e.g., what has been termed, in the scholarship of Gilbert Gottlieb, a predetermined epigenetic, or natural one), qualitative changes are believed to characterize ontogeny, and because of this, discontinuous explanations of change are needed.

Thus, virtually any statement about the character of intraindividual development involves, explicitly or implicitly, taking a position in regard to three dimensions of change: (1) descriptive continuity-discontinuity, (2) explanatory continuity-discontinuity, and (3) the quantitative versus the qualitative character of one’s descriptions and explanations—that is, the quantitative-qualitative dimension pertains to both description and explanation. In essence, then, one may have descriptive quantitative discontinuity coupled with explanatory qualitative continuity, or descriptive qualitative continuity coupled with explanatory quantitative discontinuity, and so forth.