Advancing Pragmatic Equitable Assessment Approaches in the HEALthy Brain and Child Development (HBCD) Study

• In Event: A longitudinal study of child development from pregnancy through first 10 years of life

Abstract

Incorporating valid, developmentally sensitive assessments of behavior and context is essential for studies of child neurodevelopment (Morris, et al., 2020). Neurodevelopment occurs in context, with environmental demands, including experiences of deprivation and enrichment, shaping brain architecture and function. Large studies such as HBCD will benefit from assessing both risk and resilience promoting factors within sociocultural and ecological contexts. Because early caregiver-child relationships are the most proximal influence on healthy development and vary across sociocultural contexts, assessments must include standardized observations and not rely solely on survey reports. Although surveys provide critical historical information and valuable caregiver perspectives, direct observation paradigms allow a standard metric for capturing nuanced facets of behavior. Historically, a major barrier to inclusion of such paradigms in large-scale developmental research is the extensive time and training necessary to generate scores.
In large multi-site studies such as HBCD, investigators must balance depth and breadth of assessment with participant and research team burden. Moreover, measures must account for cultural differences that impact caregiving and, consequently, child development. The Behavioral/Caregiver-Child Interactions HBCD workgroup is piloting a battery of measures that are pragmatic, developmentally sensitive, linked to brain-based measures, and designed to be representative of varied values and priorities of diverse families, with explicit emphasis on bias reduction.
A major focus of our workgroup has been the development and testing of the Emotion Regulation in Context Assessment (ERICA), a behavioral observation paradigm using “presses” to efficiently elicit variability in response to demands that tax regulatory ability (Wakschlag, et al., 2008). Building on the ecological validity approach of the DB-DOS (Krogh-Jespersen et al., 2021), we have developed a series of simple activities common to caregivers from different backgrounds that can be administered across sites (e.g., diapering, tummy time, messy and free play, and busy parent). A critical pragmatic feature our team has been developing is a “live-coding” system, with simplified codes, that will allow observational data to be available when the dataset is publicly released. Codes include three child (positive affect, irritability, social engagement) and three parent (warm affectionate responding, irritable responding, directive behavior) codes. Another innovation includes incorporation of recommendations from experts in culturally sensitive parent-child assessment, which led to our reducing the evaluative and potentially ethnocentric bias inherent in traditional coding systems. We have also added the Family Cultures Matters (FCM) task, which assesses parents’ socialization goals by asking caregivers to rank the importance of different child qualities, e.g., obedience, kindness (Harwoood et al., 1996; Ng. et al., 2012). These data will be utilized in combination with the ERICA to complement and contrast researcher ratings on how socialization goals affect parenting and child behavior.
Our symposium presentation will discuss the development and piloting of the ERICA-FCM as well as other measures included in the HBCD standardized behavioral assessment battery (see Table 1). We will also discuss challenges and opportunities for behavioral assessments in studies such as HBCD and the principles that have guided the decisions made by our working group.

Author

• Amanda Sheffield Morris, Oklahoma State University - Tulsa
  Presenting Author