Research: Families and Skills

Families play a critical role in building their children’s early skills and knowledge. There is overwhelming evidence of the importance of children’s earliest years and the power of parenting in shaping young children’s skill development. From birth to age 5, children develop skills that set the foundations for their later success in school, in their careers, and as responsible citizens.

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This project, in collaboration with researchers at Princeton University, explores how families from different socioeconomic and racial backgrounds develop skills and behaviors in their children. Data for this project come from the New Jersey Families Study, an innovative video-ethnography that captures the everyday home life of 21 families with a 2- or 4-year-old child over a continuous two-week period. This is the first time anyone has attempted an in‐home video study of this breadth, intensity, or duration.

What we’ve accomplished:

  1. We’ve completed data collection for 21 families. Each family participated in a home visit, pre-observation interview, post-observation interview, debrief, and two-week, in-home video observation.

  2. We have amassed roughly 500,000 discrete video clips, corresponding to an estimated 11,470 hours of in‐home video.

  3. We are now making plans to turn this unprecedentedly rich information into a data resource for the research community.

Visit our lab website here!