Symposium 5: Measuring stress and development in context: Opportunities, challenges, and adaptations

Abstract

As the awareness of the impact of early life stress grows, researchers are increasingly attempting to adapt measures of stress and its impacts to be collected outside of highly controlled laboratory settings They are also seeking measures that can be reliably collected on young children to reveal the impacts of chronically stressful contexts of rearing These endeavors bring opportunities and challenges, not the least of which is how to discuss stress research with the families and communities most affected In this symposium we will describe several studies attempting to collect child and family data in the community, the challenges of doing such research, and concerns about how these findings will be translated to the communities involved Beginning in pediatric primary care clinics, Emily Reilly will describe efforts to assess preschooler executive function development during pediatric well-child visit and implications for future practice, including the possibility of screening Turning to large-scale community research, Dr Santiago Morales will discuss the challenges and adaptations to collecting electroencephalography (EEG) data from hundreds of children across different research sites Moving into the home, Dr Lara Pierce will demonstrate the feasibility and challenges of collecting language input from full-day, home language recordings using Language Environmental Analysis (LENA) and associations with maternal stress and infant neurodevelopment Finally, Dr Philip Fisher will describe timely and valuable work to capture the impact of COVID-19 on families and children in weekly, nationally representative surveys