Research with infants: Tips and tricks

We will first discuss noteworthy legal and ethical issues that are particularly important when working with children. Topics that will be discussed are: when is research conducted anonymously? What data are personal data? What to do with audio/video recordings? Then, we will discuss all the do’s and don’ts when running your experiments with children. The focus will be on handling young infants and toddlers.

We will specifically talk about conducting EEG, eye-tracking, parent–child interaction observations, looking-time experiments, and computer tasks with participants from these age groups. Note that this workshop will not teach you how to use these methods, but highlights how conducting experiments with infants/toddlers raises specific difficulties, and teaches tips and tricks on how to overcome these difficulties. We will go through different case studies where the infant/toddler is showing difficult behaviour, such as pulling the EEG cap from their head, consistently not looking at the screen during eye-tracking, or crawling away from the cameras during parent–child observations. These behaviours occur very frequently when experimenting with children, but if you don’t know how to deal with them, you will probably end up having to exclude the participant from the study. This results in unnecessary data loss. We will discuss the best approach for each situation to overcome this.

Finally, during the last half hour, for online participants, we will show a video of a tour through the labs of the Institute of Language Sciences, including several labs for infant research; for participants in Utrecht, we will guide you through some of the labs and show you several techniques.

This tutorial is aimed at students/researchers with little to no prior experience working with children. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us at d.j.h.capel@uu.nl.