Tracking Parent-Child Conversations During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Mahesh Srinivasan, Professor
Psychology
Applications for Fall 2024 are closed for this project.
During 2020-2021, families were often forced to change their daily routines and encountered newfound or exacerbated life stressors. We are interested in exploring whether these changes impacted parent-child conversations each day.
This study researches parents’ and children’s daily routines during the COVID-19 pandemic through surveys that measure activities, mood, and worries about the pandemic, finances, the future, and more. We also collected audio recordings of children’s bath time routines from families each day over 30-60 days to track changes in parent-child interactions. This allows us to gather multiple data points from each participant and examine how internal and external factors (such as job or financial insecurity) might lead to changes in mood and child interaction over the course of the pandemic.
Role: We will be transcribing and checking parent audio files, and working on blog and video posts to highlight families’ contributions to our research. Specifically, we have launched a family-facing blog highlighting this study’s early results (bathtubtales.com) and are in the process of brainstorming new blog posts and possible video posts. All student researchers will be responsible for doing transcription work; they may also have the option to take the lead on blogs and/or videos, particularly if they have experience making short, digestible videos for social media.
Our student researchers will work closely with the professor, the lab manager, grad students and postdocs, and each other and will be involved in many facets of the research process, including reading relevant theoretical and empirical papers, transcribing audio data, working directly with families to learn about and write about their experiences, being involved in analysis where possible, and producing and presenting a poster at the end of the semester with the other research assistants on this project.
Qualifications: Qualifications: 1) Strong interest in language acquisition and/or cognitive development. 2) Have taken coursework in at least two of the following: Linguistics, Cognitive Science, Computer Science, Psychology, Philosophy, or Statistics. 3) Strong attention to detail. 4) Strong organizational skills. 5) Strong communication skills, and a native level of fluency in spoken and written English. 6) Have visited our lab website and read about our research before applying.
TIME COMMITMENT: 1) Nine hours of work per week preferred. 2) Two semesters of work with the lab preferred. In your application, please specify whether you are able to continue working this summer and/or the following fall or spring.
ADDITIONAL PREFERRED SKILLS (Not Required, but if you have them, please talk about these skills in your application): 1) Experience with creating digestible tiktok videos or reels. 2) Experience working with children. 3) Experience working with Qualtrics and/or Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. 4) Experience with corpus analysis. 5) Experience with community outreach. 6) Experience with transcribing audio.
Day-to-day supervisor for this project: Monica Ellwood-Lowe, Post-Doc
Hours: 9-11 hrs
Off-Campus Research Site: Hybrid Model: Work can be done remotely. Some meetings may be held in person at 2121 Berkeley Way West (the Psychology building).
Related website: http://lcdlab.berkeley.edu/
Education, Cognition & Psychology Social Sciences