Holli A. Tonyan, Psychology
Abstract: Licensed child day care in the US is often described in terms of "type" of care. Some care is located in private homes, called family-based care, whereas other care is located in specialized sites, called center-based care. My hypothesis is that these two labels actually mask significant variation in how care is organized within each of these categories. Furthermore, I suspect that variations within these categories will be associated with differences in children's stress responses to child day care settings and long-term effects of child day care, particularly when considered in light of individual differences in children. Toward the goal of eventually visiting and observing in child day care settings, I am currently conducting a pilot survey of child care providers in the San Fernando Valley to examine the range of settings available in the region and to test hypotheses about variation within the two groups. A local agency has agreed to mail our surveys to the 1,700 child care providers in region who are licensed. Surveys assess overall organization (e.g., age groupings, number of children, number of staff, staff to child ratio, linguistic and ethnic background of children) as well as staff training, caregiver/teacher attitudes and beliefs, and open-ended questions about how daily routines and activities are organized. Responses will be analyzed for patterns in responses, ranging from home-like organization to school-like organization. These results are a pilot project to use in preparing grant proposals for eventually collecting data about physiological stress responses in child day care settings.
Opportunities for student involvement:
Abstract: One of the richest resources in the USA for understanding the role of early non-parental child day care in children’s lives is the Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (NICHD SECCYD). Extensive publications from that research have already provided a wealth of information about children’s experiences, including rich observations of the kinds of caregiving behaviors children have received like physical contact, verbal stimulation, and cognitive stimulation. Such research suggests that children in higher quality care settings, those involving more resources and more positive interactions, show better long-term outcomes than children in lower quality care settings. However, the observational data have only been examined to date by overall summary scores, whereas analyses of similar observational data from other studies have suggested that a holistic, cluster analysis that examined raw observational data to extract profiles of observed behaviors (rather than the traditional summary or composite scores) might add important information about children’s experienced care to help us better understand the long-term effects of early care. For example, one child who received a great deal of physical contact might have received the same score as another child who received a great deal of verbal stimulation, but we might expect the child with a history of verbal stimulation to have relatively higher scores on measures of language development. With rich information about family background, child care contexts and experiences, and long-term outcomes, this public-use data set provides a wonderful opportunity for further understanding profiles of care received by children in a variety of circumstances as well as correlates, antecedents, and consequences of those profiles of care.
Dataset: Children were followed from birth through ages 14 and 15; with observations in home, child day care, and school settings; extensive interviews and surveys of parents and child care providers attitudes and beliefs are also part of the data set. My main focus is on observations at 6, 15, 24, and 36 months as well as the follow-up at 54 months.
Opportunities for student involvement (pending arrival of the data set):
Overview: Published literature suggests that a typical pattern of cortisol levels throughout the day for adults involves one peak elevation shortly after waking in the morning and declining levels throughout the remainder of the day. From about the age of 6 months through approximately 3 years, children show 2 peaks rather than one as measured at home: the highest levels are recorded in the morning shortly after waking with a decline throughout the morning, with the second highest levels recorded after waking from mid-day naps and declining through the remainder of the day. Researchers have become alarmed, however, because several studies now have found that in child day care settings (even those of high quality) cortisol levels do not show the same declines throughout the afternoon that are seen at home. Published meta-analyses have examined effect sizes by quality of care, gender, temperament and other variables, but no published analyses have examined features of experiences in child day care settings that might account for elevated cortisol levels. The literature review is to carefully examine the activities and contexts in which cortisol has been measured in homes, laboratory settings, and child day care settings in order to better understand the contexts in which children’s cortisol levels rise or fall.
Opportunities for student involvement:
Overview: Growing from my interest in stress cortisol responses in child day care, I began thinking about which activities in child care settings might be “stressful” and one of those activities is the daily transitions between home and child care arrangements (e.g., pick-up and drop-off times for children in center-based care). These are times when many different competing interests influence all actors involved (children, parents, child care providers) and many different ecologies of early childhood intersect (work places, car rides, child care settings, home). I created and piloted a survey of parents’ perceptions of these daily transitions.
Opportunities for student involvement:
Overview: This project examines early social foundations of emotion regulation among low-income Latino mother-infant dyads. Key variables include distress vocalization ratings, ratings of the child’s communication with the mother (clarity of information provided through non-verbal cues), the mothers’ communication with the child (to the topic, intensity and timing of the child’s distress), and the degree to which the two coordinate their behavior in resolving the emotional challenges that arise during the video. The video archive includes naturalistic observations in the children’s homes at 8, 14, 24-, and 36-months and can be linked with other observational measures like sensitivity or attachment as well as a database of survey responses including measures of temperament, income, education, home environment, and more.
Opportunities for student involvement: