devpsych-study-design
Use when designing studies for a Developmental Psychology (APA) manuscript so they can actually support a developmental-change claim. Covers age-appropriate experimental and longitudinal designs, age vs. cohort confounds, attrition, measurement invariance across ages, sample-size justification, and ethics with minors and vulnerable populations. Strengthens the design and pre-analysis plan; it does not write code.
Profile →npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill devpsych-study-design --agent claude-code
Same command for any agent — swap --agent for codex, cursor, copilot.
Weekly change comes from our own snapshots, not the repository page — it measures attention, not adoption.
# Study Design (devpsych-study-design) A developmental design must support a claim about **change**, not just measure something at different ages. Developmental Psychology reviewers probe the four threats that are specific to this field: **age vs. cohort confounds**, **attrition**, **measurement invariance across ages**, and **age-appropriate ethics and task validity**. This skill hardens the design before data collection. ## When to trigger - Planning a cross-sectional, longitudinal, accelerated, micro-genetic, or experimental developmental study - Writing a preregistration / pre-analysis plan for developmental work - A reviewer questioned age confounds, attrition, invariance, power, or ethics with minors - Justifying sample size for a growth model or an age interaction ## Developmental design standards 1. **Match the design to the change claim.** - *Cross-sectional* age comparison: cheap, but age is confounded with **cohort** and with **selection/era**; you can describe age differences, not within-person change. - *Longitudinal*: supports within-person change but introduces **attrition** and **retest** effects. - *Accelerated longitudinal (cohort-sequential)*: overlapping age coh
- When to trigger
- Developmental design standards
- Pre-data lockdown checklist (developmental)
- Sample-size justification — worked example (illustrative)
- Design-stage reviewer pushback and the venue fix
- Anti-patterns
- Output format
- Supplementary resources
What does the devpsych-study-design skill do?
Use when designing studies for a Developmental Psychology (APA) manuscript so they can actually support a developmental-change claim. Covers age-appropriate experimental and longitudinal designs, age vs. cohort confounds, attrition, measurement invariance across ages, sample-size justification, and ethics with minors and vulnerable populations. Strengthens the design and pre-analysis plan; it does not write code.
How do I install it?
Run `npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill devpsych-study-design --agent claude-code` — it drops the skill into your project so the agent can pick it up. Swap the --agent value for codex, cursor or copilot if you use one of those.
Where does this skill come from?
From brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills, a repository with 909 stars. We read it straight from the repository tree rather than a submitted listing, so what you see here is what is actually published.
Is a popular skill a good skill?
Not necessarily. Stars measure attention, not adoption — a repository can trend for a week and be abandoned. That is why we show the weekly change from our own snapshots next to the total, instead of a single flattering number.