Abstract
Efficient data collection in developmental studies is facing challenges due to the decreased birth rates in many regions, reproducibility problems in psychology research, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, we propose a novel platform for online developmental science research, the Baby’s Online Live Database (BOLD), which extends the scope of the accessible participant pool, simplifies its management, and enables participant recruitment for longitudinal studies. Through BOLD, researchers can conduct online recruitment of participants preregistered to BOLD simply by specifying their attributes, such as gender and age, and direct the participants to dedicated webpages for each study. Moreover, BOLD handles participant recruitment and reward payment, thereby freeing researchers from the labor of participant management. BOLD also allows researchers the opportunity to access data that were collected from participants in previous research studies. This enables researchers to carry out longitudinal analyses at a relatively low cost. To make BOLD widely accessible, a consortium was formed within the Japan Society of Baby Science, where members from diverse research groups discussed the blueprint of this system. Once in full-scaled operation, BOLD is expected to serve as a platform for various types of online studies and facilitate international collaboration among developmental scientists in the near future.
Highlights
Developmental science investigates the principles of human beings’ physical and mental abilities from the perspective of development
We propose the Baby’s Online Live Database (BOLD), an umbrella database system suitable for participant recruitment and management
We describe the blueprint for BOLD
Summary
Developmental science investigates the principles of human beings’ physical and mental abilities from the perspective of development In this field of research, babies, children, and their caregivers are recruited for observations, surveys, and experiments. Using BOLD, researchers can gain access to participants’ task history, including detailed information on studies that the participants have completed, and their performance. BOLD navigates potential participants to websites where researchers set up their experiments and surveys. This gives researchers flexibility to conduct various types of studies using any libraries of their choice. Broad topics of “Mental Development” and “Brain Development” were most frequently chosen, while more specific topics like “Development of Self Control,” “Moral Development,” and “Language Development” garnered a relatively small number of votes
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