Young Children's Interactions Research Articles

Understanding another's minds and social interactions in young children.

Understanding another's minds and social interactions in young children.

Quality of the parent-child interaction in young children with type 1 diabetes mellitus: study protocol

BackgroundIn young children with type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM) parents have full responsibility for the diabetes-management of their child (e.g. blood glucose monitoring, and administering insulin). Behavioral tasks in childhood, such as developing autonomy, and oppositional behavior (e.g. refusing food) may interfere with the diabetes-management to achieve an optimal blood glucose control. Furthermore, higher blood glucose levels are related to more behavioral problems. So parents might need to negotiate with their child on the diabetes-management to avoid this direct negative effect. This interference, the negotiations, and the parent's responsibility for diabetes may negatively affect the quality of parent-child interaction. Nevertheless, there is little knowledge about the quality of interaction between parents and young children with T1DM, and the possible impact this may have on glycemic control and psychosocial functioning of the child. While widely used global parent-child interaction observational methods are available, there is a need for an observational tool specifically tailored to the interaction patterns of parents and children with T1DM. The main aim of this study is to construct a disease-specific observational method to assess diabetes-specific parent-child interaction. Additional aim is to explore whether the quality of parent-child interactions is associated with the glycemic control, and psychosocial functioning (resilience, behavioral problems, and quality of life).Methods/DesignFirst, we will examine which situations are most suitable for observing diabetes-specific interactions. Then, these situations will be video-taped in a pilot study (N = 15). Observed behaviors are described into rating scales, with each scale describing characteristics of parent-child interactional behaviors. Next, we apply the observational tool on a larger scale for further evaluation of the instrument (N = 120). The parents are asked twice (with two years in between) to fill out questionnaires about psychosocial functioning of their child with T1DM. Furthermore, glycemic control (HbA1c) will be obtained from their medical records.DiscussionA disease-specific observational tool will enable the detailed assessment of the quality of diabetes-specific parent-child interactions. The availability of such a tool will facilitate future (intervention) studies that will yield more knowledge about impact of parent-child interactions on psychosocial functioning, and glycemic control of children with T1DM.

A Qualitative Study in a Rural Community: Investigating the Attitudes, Beliefs, and Interactions of Young Children and Their Parents Regarding Storybook Read Alouds

This qualitative study describes the physical and verbal interactions of rural children and their parents regarding reading books aloud. The participants’ attitudes and beliefs about sharing storybooks are also explored. The theoretical framework is based upon Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Model. One interview was conducted with each participant and video recorded. An observation of one book sharing session for each dyad was conducted and video recorded. The Adult/Child Interactive Reading Inventory (ACIRI) (DeBruin-Parecki 2004, 2007) was used during analysis of the observations. Narrative analysis was utilized. Themes and categories emerged from the data. The self-report of each participant was compared to the observation. Overall, the interview data were in alignment with the observed interactions.

The Behavioral Assessment of Social Interactions in Young Children: An examination of convergent and incremental validity

Many treatment programs for individuals with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) target social skills, and there is growing attention directed toward the development of specific interventions to improve social skills and social interactions in this population ( Hestenes & Carroll, 2000; Strain & Hoyson, 2000). However, there are limited tools available to assess social skills in children with ASD. Furthermore, there are even fewer designed to assess response to intervention. The focus of the current study was to examine the convergent, criterion, and incremental validity of a new measure designed to assess the development of social interaction skills in individuals with ASD; namely, the Behavioral Assessment of Social Interactions in Young Children (BASYC; Gillis, Callahan, & Romanczyk, 2010). A total of 44 individuals with ASD participated in this study (mean age was 7 years 11 months; range was 2–12 years old). The BASYC demonstrated convergent validity with the Social Approach subscale of the Pervasive Developmental Disorders Behavior Inventory (PDDBI; Cohen & Sudhalter, 2005) and criterion-related validity with the Socialization domain of the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales-II (VABS-II; Sparrow, Cicchetti, & Balla, 2005). One of the two BASYC subscales demonstrated incremental validity over the PDDBI in predicting variability in the VABS-II Socialization domain. The results of this research provide further support for the clinical utility of the BASYC as a measure of social interaction skills in individuals with ASD.

Assessment of social behavior in children with autism: The development of the Behavioral Assessment of Social Interactions in Young Children

There are a limited number of assessments available to examine social skills deficits in young children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs). The Behavioral Assessment of Social Interactions in Young Children (BASYC) was developed as a direct assessment of social deficits in young children with ASD relative to children without ASD. The BASYC is a semi-structured assessment designed to be administered by clinicians and teachers working with children with a possible ASD. The purpose of this study was to determine whether the BASYC discriminates social behaviors between children with and without ASD. There were 77 participants ( n = 48 children with ASD; n = 29 children without ASD) in this study. Scores on the BASYC significantly predict group membership. Sensitivity and specificity of the BASYC was .977 and .871, respectively. Item discrimination indices revealed that the majority of items on the Social Responsivity scale discriminated well between groups; however, this was not the case for the Social Initiation scale. Although additional research is required, the BASYC is currently an instrument that is easy to administer, discriminates well between children with and without ASD based on social behaviors and may assist in goal planning and monitoring of social skills treatment progress.

Exploring young children's web searching and technoliteracy

PurposeThis paper aims to report findings from an exploratory study investigating the web interactions and technoliteracy of children in the early childhood years. Previous research has studied aspects of older children's technoliteracy and web searching; however, few studies have analyzed web search data from children younger than six years of age.Design/methodology/approachThe study explored the Google web searching and technoliteracy of young children who are enrolled in a “preparatory classroom” or kindergarten (the year before young children begin compulsory schooling in Queensland, Australia). Young children were video‐ and audio‐taped while conducting Google web searches in the classroom. The data were qualitatively analysed to understand the young children's web search behaviour.FindingsThe findings show that young children engage in complex web searches, including keyword searching and browsing, query formulation and reformulation, relevance judgments, successive searches, information multitasking and collaborative behaviours. The study results provide significant initial insights into young children's web searching and technoliteracy.Practical implicationsThe use of web search engines by young children is an important research area with implications for educators and web technologies developers.Originality/valueThis is the first study of young children's interaction with a web search engine.

Digital Games for Young Children Ages Three to Six: From Research to Design

Young children ages 3 to 6 play a wide range of digital games, which are now available on large screens, handheld screens, electronic learning systems, and electronic toys, and their time spent with games is growing. This article examines effects of digital games and how they could be designed to best serve children's needs. A small body of research has found that games—when well designed—can provide rich, fun, interactive experiences that can foster young children's learning, cognitive development, skill building, social interactions, physical activity, and healthy behaviors. Research on games that are not well designed has found that violent content can lead to fear, hostility, desensitization, and aggressive behavior; stereotyped portrayals of characters can lead to stereotyped beliefs about others and oneself; and game playing can consume valuable time that could have been better spent in exploratory play, direct manipulation of objects in the environment, physical activity, and social interaction. More research is needed to discover the potential strengths and drawbacks of games for this age group to improve game design and guide decision-making about game purchases and implementation. Since young children are especially vulnerable to media messages, it is important that their media match their developmental needs, interests, and abilities. New data collection methods are enabling researchers to investigate children's responses to digital games with greater depth and accuracy and to discover how those responses are associated with outcomes. For example, software can record the time spent playing a game, time spent on specific game challenges, errors made, use of help and remediation, amount of exposure to educational content, and areas of success in the game. Data can also be collected with systems that record eye movements, technologies that recognize emotional responses to games by recording subtle shifts in facial expression, and functional magnetic resonance imaging of brain activity during game play, all of which can contribute to our understanding of processes and effects of young children's game playing. The results of research using these new methods and more traditional methods will help to discover principles of game design that can help make games more developmentally appropriate and beneficial, building on the ways young children naturally play and learn.

Consistent patterns of interaction in young children’s conflicts with their siblings

This study investigates whether preschool-aged children show consistent patterns of behaviour in conflicts with their siblings. Consistency was assessed at the nomothetic (i.e., group), idiographic (i.e., individual), and idiosyncratic (i.e., consistent patterns that differed from the norm) levels. We examined conflicts between 19 2-year-old and 19 4-year-old children and their siblings. Both age groups showed consistent idiographic and nomothetic patterns of interactions. Two-year-old children used idiosyncratic patterns of responses to the conflict overtures of others (i.e., they deviated from the norm in consistent ways) while 4-year-old children did not. The variance in the responses of the younger children was greater than that found for the older children. Together these results suggest that as children mature though the preschool years their conflict patterns become more homogeneous. The importance of studying patterns in conflict at all three levels is discussed.

Training Graduate Student Clinicians to Use Preschool Peer Interaction Strategies

Abstract Playing with peers is an important part of childhood—what children learn from interacting with one another has enormous impact on both their social and language development. Although many children naturally develop the ability to interact well with peers, some children have difficulty interacting with other children and may miss out on important learning opportunities as a result. Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) can target the peer interactions of young children on their caseload, assuming that they have the knowledge and skills with which to address them. SLP graduate programs have the opportunity to provide future SLPs with both knowledge and skills-based training. This study assessed a graduate program in which three graduate clinicians participated in a preschool program for children with communication disorders; peer interactions were targeted within the program. The students were observed and data was collected regarding their use of peer interaction facilitation strategies in the group sessions both prior to and after they participated in a direct training program regarding the use of such skills. Outcomes indicate that the direct training program resulted in a statistically significant increase in the students' use of different strategies to facilitate peer interactions among the children in the group.

Reuben's fall: complicating ‘goodness’ and schoolroom disobedience

This article offers a snapshot of children's sentient and relational spirituality within a moment of disobedience in a kindergarten classroom. It is a portion of a study that employed a combination of qualitative inquiry (by Eisner in 1998) and rhizoanalyis, adapted from the work of Deleuze and Guattari (of 1987), MacNaughton (of 2005). The purpose of the larger study was to present moments of kindergarten children's disobedience in order to more fully understand the complexity of each moment. Rhizoanalysis was engaged in order to open lateral paths toward new understandings and questions regarding the disobedient actions of children, and so served to destabilise and challenge the known and given texts of children's disobedience and to disrupt the assumptions often made regarding the actions and interactions of young children as ‘bad’ or ‘good’ and offer ways to ‘see’ each moment of interaction as many things – both and neither bad nor good. The moment of disobedience and discussion offered within this paper focus on the children's engagement with one another as sensory and spiritual, using Hay and Nye's notion of spirituality as awareness‐, mystery‐, and value‐sensing.

`I told you so': justification used in disputes in young children's interactions in an early childhood classroom

While justifications are used frequently by young children in their everyday interactions, their use has not been examined to any great extent. This article examines the interactional phenomenon of justification used by young children as they manage social organization of their peer group in an early childhood classroom. The methodological approaches of conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis were used to analyse video-recorded and transcribed interactions of young children (aged 4—6 years) in a preparatory classroom in a primary school in Australia. The focus is an episode that occurred within the play area of the classroom and involved a dispute of ownership relating to a small, wooden plank. Justifications were frequent occurrences as the young participants drew upon justificatory devices to support their stances. The justifications related to the concepts of ownership and were used by those engaged in the particular dispute to support their positions and provide reasons for their actions. Four types of justificatory responses using child-constructed rules are highlighted. They are: justification based on the rule of transferred ownership; the rule of first possession; rules associated with custodianship; and the rule of third-party verification. The justifications are practices that work to build and reinforce individual children's status within the group, which in turn contributes to the social order of the classroom.

Using High-Probability Request Sequences to Increase Social Interactions in Young Children With Autism

We investigated the effects of an intervention using high-probability request sequences with embedded peer modeling to increase social interactions of children with autism in a classroom. The effects of the intervention on compliant responding to social requests and social behaviors were monitored using a single-subject multiple baseline design across children. Additionally, social validity regarding the intervention goals, procedures, and outcomes was measured by relevant consumers. The results of this study indicate that all three children's compliant responding to low-probability requests and social behaviors increased with the intervention and were maintained. Furthermore, the target children's social behaviors generalized to untrained peers and nontraining settings. The social validity results indicated a high level of consumer acceptability and usability among relevant consumers.

Research Trend of Intervention for Social Interaction of Young Children with Disabilities in Inclusive Setting: A Review from 1990 to 2005

Research Trend of Intervention for Social Interaction of Young Children with Disabilities in Inclusive Setting: A Review from 1990 to 2005

Case/Focus Interaction in Young Children’s Interpretationof dake (only) in Japanese

Case/Focus Interaction in Young Children’s Interpretationof <i>dake</i> (only) in Japanese

Improvement in Sensory Impairment and Social Interaction in Young Children with Autism Following Treatment with an Original Qigong Massage Methodology

In clinical research, sensory impairment is considered one of the core deficits in autism and is associated with impaired socialization, behavioral disturbances and bowel and sleep problems. The effectiveness of the Cignolini methodology, an original Qigong massage methodology, in treating sensory impairment in young children with autism was evaluated in a small, controlled study. Thirteen children with autism between the ages of three and six received daily treatment according to the methodology for 5 months. Compared with untreated children, treated children experienced significant improvement of their sensory impairment (p < 0.01), and demonstrated increased social skills (p < 0.04) and basic living skills (p < 0.02) on standardized measures. In addition, all of the children with bowel and sleep abnormalities demonstrated improvement after treatment.

Conversation and theory of mind: Do children talk their way to socio‐cognitive understanding?

This paper presents a selective review of the literature addressing the influence of young children's conversational environments and interactions on their psychological understanding of persons. Our dual purposes are to reveal some consensus on the current state of knowledge and to foster a programmatic approach to future research. The initial sections clarify what is meant byconversationand describe the nature of theory‐of‐mind development. We adopt the termsocio‐cognitive developmentto convey the fact that children's theory‐of‐mind understanding becomes more elaborate and flexible throughout childhood, and we discuss issues of measurement. The following sections deal directly with the influence of conversational environments and interactions on children's socio‐cognitive understanding. We present findings that suggest that conversational interactions are of fundamental importance for the development of children's socio‐cognitive understanding, and we examine the particular aspects of the former that have been shown to be the most effective in promoting the latter. We discuss the relationship between children's conversational references to thoughts and feelings and experimental assessments of their socio‐cognitive understanding, and we offer a detailed list of considerations for future research. In the remaining sections, we highlight the important roles of (i) young children's expanding linguistic competence and (ii) their relationships, and we discuss implications for individual differences in children's developing social competence.

Broadening the Interpretive Lens: Considering Individual Development along with Sociocultural Views of Learning to Understand Young Children's Interactions during Socially Mediated Literacy Events

Sociocultural theories provide a useful lens for interpreting behaviors as individuals enter contexts requiring social interactions. These theories help us understand that learning is stimulated and nourished by interactions with others, supporting a view that learning is essentially a socially inspired process. This emphasis on the social and cultural origins of knowledge, however, often minimizes dynamics related to individual development that influence how we respond to others and how others respond to us. Most relevant to this argument is information related to the influence of (a) the child's history of relationships, (b) the child's understanding of others and others' behavior, and (c) the child's cognitive perspective on the world. To account for these influences, the authors propose a model of collaborative literacy events (CLEs). The model merges understandings related to a sociocultural theory and individual development to broaden interpretations of children's behavior during socially mediated literacy events.

Governance of Children's Everyday Spaces

With the emergence of sociological and economic change there is increasing attention given to governance of children's spaces in recent years. This paper discusses these changes and how they have impacted on, and contributed to, this increased interest. The paper draws on the sociology of childhood framework in order to examine how children themselves actively respond to and participate in enacting governance within school spaces and also within their own peer cultures. It addresses an in-progress study being undertaken to explore young children's everyday interactions within an early childhood setting.

Video recording as interaction: participant observation of children's everyday life

This article investigates methodological and analytical implications of video-based techniques for conducting participant observations with children (6–8 years of age). Video-based data are used to illustrate arguments concerning how children use different interaction strategies while being observed with a video camera. It is also argued that visual recordings constitute a source of knowledge in their own right. Hence, a strong claim is made concerning the importance of researchers reflecting upon recording procedures. The article also offers a discussion of some methodological issues that play a crucial role in video recording young children's peer interactions. The article emphasizes the need to attend to and reflect on all components of the research process, including procedures for data collection and visual analysis, as well as how the visual material is reproduced in the written text.

Accounting for young children’s competence in educational research: New perspectives on research ethics

Educational researchers working with young children face ethical issues when researching the talk and interactions of young children. Issues around the competence of children to participate in research pose challenges to educational researchers and to the young participants and their families, within what are seen as increasingly risky and regulated research environments. This paper examines some of these issues in light of recent sociological perspectives that account for children as competent practitioners of their social worlds. Drawing on research investigating the governance of the lives of young children in Australia, we examine the rights of children to be both seen and heard as competent research participants. These sociological directions afford opportunities to reconsider the ethical issues around research with young children. Such an approach breaks new ground in early childhood education research.