2-166 - Population-based perspectives on child development

Session Type: Conversation Roundtable

Integrative Statement

Moderator: Nicole Talge, Ph.D.

Child development is an interdisciplinary field that leverages basic science, social science, technology, and analytics to inform our understanding of how environmental and biological factors interact across time to influence individual differences in functioning and health. Much of our knowledge, however, is generated from small, non-representative samples. In addition, the use of informative but resource-intensive measures often precludes breadth of assessment in large-scale investigations. The increasing collection of biomarkers in large-scale studies has expanded the opportunity to explore complex interactions across development, but also places new demands on bioinformatics and analytics in order to exploit these opportunities. These multiple challenges need to be addressed to enable direct empirical tests of transactional hypotheses that span “neurons to neighborhoods” as well as the evaluation of potential public health impacts. Research at the intersection of developmental and population science is well-positioned to address these issues.

Our conversation roundtable will discuss the challenges and opportunities generated from employing population-based approaches to the study of child development. Facilitated by an interdisciplinary and international panel of experts, this discussion will highlight the following four topics: behavioral assessment; biological assessment; logistics, bioinformatics, and infrastructural resources; and “lessons learned” from previous large-scale initiatives. Our goal is to engender a rigorous debate among the panelists who, together with the audience, reflect upon the current state of the science, barriers to progress, and the strengths/limitations of population-based approaches to child development research.

Sub Unit

• Methods, History, Theory

Moderator

• Nicole Talge, Michigan State University

Panelists

• Philip Zelazo, University of Minnesota

• Christopher S Monk, University of Michigan

• Henning Tiemeier, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry/Psychology, Erasmus MC

• Daniel Keating, University of Michigan