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. Sazawal1,2
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 childs
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 childs
social referencing skills and parent child behavior during the session.
Mother and childs behavior (during the observation session was documented
as Social Referencing to Mother); Contact with Caregiver, Proximity to
Mother; Mothers Affect; Childs 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
, 5th International Conference on Methods and Techniques
in Behavioral Research, 30 August - 2 September 2005, Wageningen, The
Netherlands.
© 2005 Noldus
Information Technology bv
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