Methodology now: use of on-line technologies Flashcards
Traditional Family Research
- Researchers chose Breadth or Depth, or studies were extremely expensive!
- cost of assessing humans- expensive
- Parenting
- Videotaped observations considered the gold-standard- let’s see what people do. Home visits of parents and children
- Questionnaires – the quick & dirty alternative!
- get observations of parents and children as well as objective measures
Etch-a-Sketch
Example of a parent and child doing the task.
* Asking them to copy a picture of a house.
* Diagonal lines are tough.
* Tell parent and child that they shouldn’t touch each others dials but they need to try work together to draw the picture
Typical question is- how much is the parent excluding warmth with the child. Children rate this on a scale from 1 to 5 as warm and enjoyment.
For video- warmth was 4- parent helping child
directed by parent- 3
On the whole mothers are more warm and responses. Fathers tend to take a more task orientated approach.
Etch-a-sketch
What did children say about what their mum and dad are like
They say there’s no difference between mother and fathers’ warmth
Typical Questionnaire
- How much do you enjoy spending time alone with your child?
- How affectionate are you towards your child?
- How much do you criticize your child?
- How often do you get into disagreements with your child?
- How much do you enjoy being your child’s parent?
Twins, Family & Behaviour Study (TFaB) Bonamy Oliver & Ali Pike
Overview
Goal- try different methodologies to get measurements of family life but without having to do home visits.
Questionnaire wave 1:
3 years 9 months
Telephone interviews wave 2:
4 years 8 months
Skype observations wave 3:
5 years 6 months
Questionnaire wave 4:
6 years 0 months
TFaB
How research has changed:
invited to participate in research study in the mid 90s via letter. At that time, more than 2/3 of those families agreed to take part- this was a huge uptake.
The first experimental part of this study (20 years later) was to see if we can recruit in a similar way to ONS. Essentially a pilot study. ONS contacted 1000 mothers who had given birth to twins. Below is the response rate.
TFaB
Sample
Mums
* N = 277
* Mean age at birth = 33 y 10 m
Dads/Partner
* N = 126
* Mean age at birth = 36 y 10 m
- 87.7% married or cohabiting with parent of twins at Wave 1
- Family Income Mean = £30,000 - £39,999 pa
Recruited via mothers- initially only questionnaire mothers. 6 months later, fathers were also questionnaired. Less than half of fathers agreed to participate. Its been very tricky to get information from fathers.
Twin Zygosity
MZ- 35.7%
DZ- 62.8%
MZ- 35.7%
DZss- 32.1%
DZos- 30.7%
Questionnaire Time 1
- Household (dis)organisation
- Parenting strategies
- Parent-Child Relationship
- Parental warmth and negative feelings
- Child Externalising behaviours
Telephone Interviews (Time 2): Preschool
Five-Minute Speech Sample (FMSS)
+ examples
- Telephone interview
- Preschool Five-Minute Speech Sample
- Expressed Emotion (Daley et al., 2013)
Positive comments, high warmth
“She’s very kind, very sweet natured little girl, very thoughtful. Um…her understanding and…of things is very good- um she surprises me a lot of the time”
Critical comments, low warmth
“He can’t accept the fact that there’s siblings and fights for my attention all the time, daily, all day, every day, it’s exhausting”
One mother talking about her two twins in very different ways
Expressed Emotion scores
These recordings were transcribed
* Coders noted the frequency of positive comments
- Praise, approval, appreciation, or a positive trait (e.g., ‘[Twin name] is sociable’).
* and negative comments
- Finding fault with the child, or indicative of a negative trait (e.g.,‘[Twin name] is irritable’).
* Proportion scores calculated:
- Positive comments/Negative comments
* Mean = 3.67; SD = 2.70; Range = 0.50-14.00
Range- some parents said more negative than positives things about their children and vise versa
EE & Twin Relationship Quality (Mark, Pike, Latham & Oliver, 2017)
These expressed emotions were made by parents own but also child’s predictive behaviour
Want to know- did we still see these association or parents express emotion/ prediction. They did.
The more positive mothers were vs twin relationship a year later
The mothers answers to the parenting questionnaire was also predicitive and they both provided important info that was predictive of twin related quality.
Also predicted later child problem behaviours. All by telephone in comparison to face to face (less confronting)
Therefore… it was worth it
Time 3: Skype Observations
- Original etch-a-sketch task designed by Deater-Deckard et al. (1997)
- Online version of the etch-a-sketch task used via Skype- picture of house comes up to copy. Instead of dial, ask child to use keys for horizontal and vertical. A web cam captures the faces of the parent and child.
Parent-Child Skype Interaction
Face-validity- saw how dad and daughter react. Also saw that the child looked comfortable.
Convergent validity (Oliver & Pike, 2019)
- 20 mothers and their 5-6 year-old children completed the Etch-a-Sketch task at home & on-line (via skype).
- No mean-level differences in positive or negative parenting across settings.
- Across-context correlations were also substantial:
- Positive parenting r = .63
- Negative parenting r = .45
