This month, we are introducing a new type of research activity which involves recording a video of you and your child. So, we thought it might be helpful to tell you about how video has helped researchers to better understand children’s development.
You may know the old saying “a picture paints a thousand words”. Well, it is also true of video, especially for child development researchers! You’ll have probably noticed this yourself too when trying to update friends and relatives on how your little one is getting on – it is often a lot easier to send a video than it is to explain what interesting thing your youngster started doing that morning!
These days we tend to take lots of videos to capture memories of our child’s early life and development. When looking back at these kinds of videos you’ll likely see that they contain a wealth of detail – from their cute and funny little expressions to the ways they may say or do things, or even actions or behaviours you didn’t noticed at the time you took the recording. All the kind of things it is really difficult to put down in writing or to explain to someone… the kinds of things that are difficult to ask you about in a questionnaire!
Researchers who are trying to understand children’s development rely on video a lot for this reason – video allows you to see the subtle things that children do that sometimes parents aren’t aware of or might find hard to put into words when answering a questionnaire.
The use of video in child development research
Video recordings are an extremely rich source of information for child development researchers and have led to many important insights! For example, in 2000 researchers Kathy Stansbury and Marian Sigman revealed using video recordings that from a very early age toddlers start to manage their emotions by distracting themselves. This is obviously something that adults do a lot, as do older children, but it was not known at the time what age this behaviour starts. The researchers found that self-distraction is used by even very young children and is probably an important skill in their ‘toolkit’ to help them manage mild stress – e.g., their first day at nursery or meeting a new person. Precisely how children do this is difficult if not impossible for parents to always express, but video allowed the researchers to see how toddlers flexibly used self-distraction to help them get through a tricky situation without getting upset – in this case, being told they could not have a sweetie.
Again in 2000, Naseem Choudhury and Kathleen Gorman, another pair of child development researchers, were interested in how children maintain their attention and concentration during learning. Using video recordings they could see that children who were able to concentrate for longer regularly looked or glanced away from the task they were doing. In other words, a child might seem like they are losing focus but actually these occasional glances away were actually helping them to stay on task for longer! It was as if these little ‘micro-breaks’ helped them to keep going.
BabySteps video research activities
For the “Video you and your child chatting!” research activity we are particularly curious to see how children use language in everyday conversations and how these help them to learn. We hope you might be interested in helping us with this. You may have seen the research activity in the Research Activities list already – if not, please check it out! The research activity will appear in the app when your child turns 35 months and will be available to complete for 2 months.
We appreciate that some people might feel a bit self-conscious taking a video. Please rest assured that the video you submit is kept extremely confidential and safe, and only our professional researchers will ever view them. You can also ask us to delete them at any time if for any reason you change your mind about submitting them. But we hope you will actually find it fun and you will be creating a little memory of your child at this special age for you to keep. If you do the recording via the app, it will save to your camera roll for you to keep as a memory.
We have also created a Q&A in case you have any specific questions about how the recording feature of the app works and where the video is being saved. You can find the Q&A by going back to the ‘Home’ screen and sliding to the left on the ‘News & Articles’ section.