Brief Interventions Influence the Quantity and Quality of Caregiver-Child Conversations in an Everyday Context

Frontiers in Psychology

article

Apoorva Shivaram¹  Yaritza Chavez¹  Erin Anderson¹  Autumn Fritz¹  Ryleigh Jackson¹  Louisa Edwards²  Shelley Powers¹  Melissa Libertus³  Susan Hespos¹ 

[1] Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, United States;Department of Applied Statistics, University of Virginia, United States;Department of Psychology, Learning Research and Development Center, University of Pittsburgh, United States

关键词: cognitive development;    informal learning;    brief interventions;    food pantry;    caregiver-child conversations;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2021.645788

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Reading and arithmetic are difficult cognitive feats for children to master and youth from low-income communities are often less “school ready” in terms of letter and number recognition skills ( Lee and Burkam, 2002 ). One way to prepare children for school is by encouraging caregivers to engage children in conversations about academically-relevant concepts by using numbers, recognizing shapes, and naming colors ( Levine et al., 2010 ; Fisher et al., 2013 ). Previous research shows that caregiver-child conversations about these topics rarely take place in everyday contexts ( Hassinger-Das et al., 2018 ), but interventions designed to encourage such conversations, like displaying signs in a grocery store, have resulted in significant increases in caregiver-child conversations ( Ridge et al., 2015 ; Hanner et al., 2019 ). We investigated whether a similar brief intervention could change caregiver-child conversations in an everyday context. We observed 212 families in a volunteer-run facility where people who are food-insecure can select food from available donations. Volunteers greet all the clients as they pass through the aisles, offer food, and restock the shelves as needed. About 25% of the clients have children with them and our data consist of observations of the caregiver-child conversations with 2- to 10-year-old children. Half of the observation days consisted of a baseline condition in which the quantity and quality of caregiver-child conversation was observed as the client went through aisles where no signs were displayed, and volunteers merely greeted the clients. The other half of the observation days consisted of a brief intervention where signs were displayed (signs-up condition), where, volunteers greeted the clients and pointed out that there were signs displayed to entertain the children if they were interested. In addition, there was a within-subject manipulation for the intervention condition where each family interacted with two different categories of signs. Half of the signs had academically-relevant content and the other half had non-academically-relevant content. The results demonstrate that the brief intervention used in the signs-up condition increases the quantity of conversation between a caregiver and child. In addition, signs with academically-relevant content increases the quality of the conversation. These findings provide further evidence that brief interventions in an everyday context can change the caregiver-child conversation. Specifically, signs with academically-relevant content may promote school readiness.

【 授权许可】

CC BY