Case study on father–child communication in Chinese urban apartment houses through active RFID technology

Abstract

This paper used Active Radio Frequency Identification (Active RFID) technology to identify in which rooms fathers and their child tend to stay together and talk, and in which rooms they stay separately in seven one-child families living in Chinese urban apartment houses. The father was found to stay together with the child 0.5%–25% of the time when both father and child stayed at home. The use of the living room as the place in which the child stays with the father and talks was found to be highest (five out of seven families), followed by the dining room and the child's room. In over half of the cases when the child stays with the father in the living room or dining room and either of them talk, the child spoke over 1.6 times more than the father. However, in the child's room, the child always spoke less than the father, and the duration of the child's speech was less than 70% of that of the father. Findings showed that the instances in which child and father stay in different rooms fell into two groups. First, five of the seven subject fathers tended to stay in the living room, whereas the children stayed either in their room or in their parents' room to use the PC. Second, two fathers stayed in the studio or dining room to work, while their children stayed in the living room or their own rooms. For both groups, the duration of these periods of stay covered 30.0%–81.4% of the time during which both the father and child stayed at home.