Observation of Parent‐child Interaction With Two‐ to Three‐year‐olds*

Abstract

A method of home observations of mother-child interaction is described. Its development is outlined in terms of the relevant conceptual and methodological issues, and the concomitant tactical decisions involved in development are discussed. The scheme focuses on parental responsivity, affect, social communication and social control, and a novel combination of time-interval and event-sequential recording is used to discriminate parental functioning in these areas. The measures have been shown to have a satisfactorily high level of reliability, and preliminary analysis indicates construct validity.

Eating behaviour and its variability in 1-year-old children

“…One other code (reject) was used with different frequencies by the two observers, though the correlation between them was high. The tendency of one observer to pick up more instances of a particular action than another can be a major problem in observational studies (Dowdney et al, 1984). As this behaviour was in any case rarely seen the code was not used in further analysis, though further work is needed on the coding of this behaviour as it is likely to be more common in some clinical samples (Lindberg et al, 1996).…”

Parent-child interaction and conduct disorder

“…Others have stressed the importance of the parent's skill at structuring joint activity so as to keep it going, and their skill at using control which is subtle and sensitive (Dunn and Kendrick, 1982;Schaffer and Crook, 1979). Studies that analyze the sequential patterns within the stream of behavior can yield information about who starts joint play and about how the other person responds to these initiations (Dowdney et al, 1984;Gardner, submitted;Pettit and Bates, 1989).…”

“…However, there is a great deal of literature on normal interaction that suggests variables that are thought to be indicative of healthy parent-child relationships. For example, authors such as Maccoby and Martin (1983) and Dowdney et al (1984) have suggested that such "high-quality" interactions will involve mutual expressions of warmth and enjoyment and evidence of mutual interest and cooperation. Others have stressed the importance of the parent's skill at structuring joint activity so as to keep it going, and their skill at using control which is subtle and sensitive (Dunn and Kendrick, 1982;Schaffer and Crook, 1979).…”

Emotional Rejection of the Infant: Status of the Concept

“…This was covered thoroughly in the 2011 paper under the headings of self-rating questionnaires [91,92,93,94,95,96,97,98,99,100,101,102,103,104,105,106,107], expressed emotion [108,109], interviews [110,111,112], observation [71,113,114,115,116,117,118,119], and neuro-scientific investigations. Almost all publications during the last 5 years have used self-rating questionnaires.…”