Use of BASIS installed in palm device for observation of child’s interaction with physical and social environment

A. Sarkar¹, A. Dutta², U. Dhingra² P. Dhingra¹, P. Verma¹, G.S. Hiremath², C.P. Khokhar³, R. Juyal¹, M. Osmany¹, V.P. Menon¹, J. Kumar¹, R.E. black² and S. Sazawal^1,2

¹Center for Micronutrient Research, Annamalai University, India
²Department of International Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore USA
³Department of Psychology, Gurukul Kangri University, Haridwar, India

Physical and social setting is important in influencing child’s behavior through the activities and interactions with socializing agents. Traditionally, the data collection is based on the manual recording of the observations of parent child interaction which is cumbersome, prone to observation errors and inconsistencies. In this study, we developed and tested ‘Behavior and Social Interaction Software’ (BASIS), and installed on Palm Handheld device to record the observations. BASIS was designed using Visual Basics and Appforge. The multiple screens of recording observations were child’s location, broad activity of the child, state, and interaction of the child with socializing agent; with a set of choices for each screen. The observer needed to select desired location option, and the program automatically recorded it with other relevant parameters against time. Data were downloaded and stored in a laptop everyday at the base station.

In this study, we assessed the verbal, visual and motor interactions of the child with its social and physical environment. The behaviors for observing the caretaker-child interaction were selected and suitably modified to assess the target population. The caretaker measures included warmth, aggression, neglect, nurturance, response, affect and expressed attitude, and behavior involvement. The child’s measures included aggression, self reliance and adequacy, independence, emotional stability, responsiveness, social behavior and quality of play. Two observers recorded structured continuous parent child interactions at home in a peri urban setting in Northern India, for 1 hour, on 572 children, aged 24-48 months. The inter observer reliability was above 80%.

In our experience, BASIS installed in the Palm Handheld device is an innovative method to address the complexities of measuring the child’s interactions with its socializing agents in an unrestricted environment. Additionally, there are inherent advantages due to the ease of recording large variety and numbers of observations, reducing data entry errors, and easy to achieve high inter observer reliability.

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.

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