Adapting and administering the Berkeley Puppet Interview digitally in low-resource and crisis contexts

• In Event: Innovative and contextually relevant measurement instruments to enhance Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) monitoring and evaluation processes

Proposal

How do you measure the social and emotional learning (SEL) skills of children in low-resource and crisis contexts? There are several challenges in measuring SEL skills of children in the early years of primary school. When measuring skills for children in low-resource and crisis contexts, we are trying to balance three different, and sometimes competing, interests (D’Sa, 2019). First, we have to balance the time and resources that we have at our disposal. Since there are few SEL measures that have been developed for and used extensively in low-resource and crisis contexts, programs and studies that want to monitor or evaluate the SEL skills of children need to either adapt existing measures or develop new ones (Ferrans & Lee, 2019). This can be burdensome in terms of costs and time. Second we have to balance the validity and reliability of the scores from the SEL measures. Validity refers to whether we are measuring the constructs we intend to measure while reliability refers to whether the scores are measured in a consistent manner. The most cost- and resource–effective measures are self-report scales that use a Likert-type response option. However, they are often prone to social desirability bias and do not function well with young children (Mellor & Moore, 2014). Third, we need to ensure that the measures we develop and use are developmentally and culturally appropriate for young children.

One type of assessment that has been used extensively in clinical and small-sample studies in high-resource contexts is the Berkeley Puppet Interview (Measelle et al., 1998; BPI). Children are presented with two identical puppets that present opposing views on a simple statement. Children are then asked which one is more like them and why. This type of measure has been demonstrated to be developmentally appropriate for young children between 4-10 years of age and the scores from these measures have a strong tradition of being valid and reliable. Yet, administering the BPI can be very costly; training assessors to present the puppets to young children in a neutral manner and scoring the explanations that children provide can be very time-intensive. Based off of work from Sabol and colleagues (2021) to develop an app-based version of the BPI, we built an offline, open-access, content management system (CMS) and app that can be used to develop and administer a BPI-inspired assessment to children in low-resource and crisis contexts. In this presentation we will discuss the process of developing the CMS and app and focus on the lessons we have learned from developing and administering SEL surveys using this platform in Liberia, Honduras, and Haiti.

Authors

• Aimee Lyons, University of Notre Dame-Pulte Institute

• Nikhit D'Sa, University of Notre Dame