Evaluation of Caregiver-Infant Interactions Flashcards
(+) Practical application - Antenatal classes
P: A strength of the research into caregiver interactions is that it has led to successful applications such as antenatal classes.
E: Professionals involved in prenatal and neonatal care and pregnancy / childcare courses; apps, books, and websites encourage parents to interact with their babies, supporting healthy attachment and benefiting lifelong relationships. This leads to happier, well-adjusted individuals, reducing reliance on welfare, social services, and NHS mental health care.
E: This is a strength as this is a valuable contribution to society and helps to reduce long-term costs of social services.
(+) Well controlled procedures
P: A strength of the research is that it is a controlled observation and therefore is a highly controlled procedure.
E: The interactions are filmed from different angles. This means that very fine details can be recorded and analysed later.
E: This is a strength of research into caregiver-infant interactions because several researchers can re-watch the video clips as many times as is necessary to ensure that all behaviours are recorded.
L: Therefore, the findings about caregiver-interactions have high internal validity.
(-) Problems with testing infants’ behaviours
P: A limitation of observational research testing caregiver-infant interactions is that it is difficult to reliably test and is open to observer bias
E: Infants’ mouths are fairly in constant motion and the expressions that are tested occur frequently by chance.
E: This is a limitation as it makes it difficult to distinguish between general activity and specific behaviours thus there is a great deal of interpretation of what babies are actually doing.
L; The findings about caregiver-infant interactions may not be valid,
(-) Low population validity
P: A criticism of the research is that the supporting research has low population validity.
E: M & M’s sample consisted of six infants and Brazelton et al studied 12 mother-infants pairs. These are both very small sample sizes and may not be representative of all infants.
E: The findings about caregiver-infant interactions may be difficult to generalise to other infants (low external validity).
L: This reduces the validity of the claim that caregivers and infants communicate via interactional synchrony and reciprocity.
