Association of Social Referencing with Developmental Scores of Preschool Children

U.Dhingra², P. Verma¹, P. Dhingra¹, A. Sarkar¹, M. Osmany¹, R. Juyall¹, R.E. Black², V.P Menon¹, J. Kumar¹, A. Dutta², G.S. Hiremath², B. Lozoff³, M. Black⁴ and S. Sazawal^1,2

¹Center for Micronutrient Research, Annamalai University, India
²Department of International Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD, USA
³Center for Human Growth and Development, University of Michigan, MI, USA
⁴Department of Pediatrics, University of Maryland, MD, USA

Social referencing is a measure of social and emotional development wherein children use information from caregiver to appraise events and regulate behavior. Studies so far, have employed manual or video recording of observations of social referencing skills, proximity, approach, and caregiver and child’s affect during the session. These methods of recording have limitations due to inconsistency, difficulty in recording duration of behavioral observations, complexity in analyzing, and interpreting findings. In this study we used The Observer^® 5.0 (Noldus Information Technology bv, The Netherlands), an automated manual event recorder installed in a laptop for collecting, collating, and analyzing the data. Social referencing assessments were done as continuous behavioral observations for 11 minutes, among 1240 preschool children, in a playroom clinic setting, in periurban slum in Northern India. Child and caregiver were placed on a 16 squares of equal size floor mat, with toys. Familiarization toys for first 5 minutes and 3 different ambiguous stimulus toys for 2 minutes were given to the child for exploration. Using The Observer 5.0 we designed a project to observe and code the child’s social referencing skills and parent child behavior during the session. Mother and child’s behavior (during the observation session was documented as Social Referencing to Mother); Contact with Caregiver, Proximity to Mother; Mother’s Affect; Child’s Affect ; Latency to first touch to Distractor/ Stimulus toy; Contact with Toy and Distance to Stimulus toy (closeness to the toy). The durational events were recorded as states and momentary frequencies as events.

In this study, we found that The Observer 5.0 is useful in systematic and error free recording of the multiple events involved in collecting observational data on social referencing of children in an ambiguous setting. The data is recorded and stored in an analyzable form and analysis functions produce statistical outputs including independent group comparisons to answer specific research questions.

Paper presented at Measuring Behavior 2005 , 5^th International Conference on Methods and Techniques in Behavioral Research, 30 August - 2 September 2005, Wageningen, The Netherlands.

© 2005 Noldus Information Technology bv