The North Carolina Child Development Research Collaborative

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The North Carolina Child Development Research
Collaborative
Martha J. Cox

• University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• University of North Carolina at Greensboro
• North Carolina State
• Duke

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The North Carolina Child Development Research
Collaborative

• Built upon multidisciplinary activities across
  universities
• University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• Duke
• University of North Carolina at Greensboro
• North Carolina State
• Investigators from many disciplines
• Behavioral Genetics
• Developmental Neuroscience
• Life-course Sociology
• Anthropology
• Nursing
• Social Work
• Education
• Developmental Psychology

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The North Carolina Child Development Research
Collaborative

• Built upon the foundation of the Center for
  Developmental Science and discussion and
  collaboration across disciplines begun by the
  Carolina Consortium in 1987
• Includes a pre- and post-doctoral training
  program and a proseminar series that has been
  meeting weekly for 15 years
• Fosters the conducting of multidisciplinary,
  integrative research on early childhood in a way
  not possible through individual grants
• Transcends a main effect model of development
  that sees each influence as an independent
  contribution and embraces a model in which
  influences from various levels of analysis are
  seen as coactional or reciprocal

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The North Carolina Child Development Research
Collaborative

• Developmental Systems Perspective, a hallmark of
  developmental science
• A transdisciplinary approach to human development
  will allow us to encompass the main levels of
  analysis from the cultural and societal levels
  studied by anthropologists and sociologists to
  the neural and genetic levels studied by
  biologically trained persons
• Fundamentally assumes that important processes of
  development cannot be studied adequately without
  a multidisciplinary approach that recognizes the
  complexity of development
• The focus of the CDRC is on the
  multidisciplinary, multilevel study of social,
  emotional, and cognitive functioning across early
  childhood and across many important transitions,
  considering continuity, plasticity and adaptation
  in social, emotional, and cognitive functioning
  and social, interpersonal, and family experiences

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The North Carolina Child Development Research
Collaborative
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The North Carolina Child Development Research
Collaborative

• Specific Aim
• To provide an environment that will increase the
  capacity of the participating faculty and
  students to conduct interdisciplinary research
  that addresses the broad mandate outlined above
• Accomplished through
• The establishment of a longitudinal,
  collaborative research study
• Workshops, seminars and course development to
  increase interdisciplinary knowledge and develop
  new methods for interdisciplinary research,
• The training of a generation of young scholars
  who are equipped to conduct interdisciplinary
  research.

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The Centerpiece of the CDRC The Durham Child
Health Development Study An interdisciplinary,
multilevel, longitudinal investigation

• Designed to
• Describe interrelated patterns of continuity,
  qualitative change, and quantitative change in
  social, emotional, and cognitive functioning from
  birth to early schooling.
• Examine a systems model of biological,
  psychological, interpersonal, and broader
  contextual processes that contribute to
  continuity and change in functioning
• Recommend policy and programmatic elements, based
  on interdisciplinary research evidence, that will
  enhance the psychosocial development and
  intellectual competence of children

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The Durham Child Health Development Study
Studying young children, families and
communities to learn more about growth and
development.

• Integrated working groups of researchers
  implement multiple levels of measurement based on
  their own expertise and resulting from their
  collaborations with interdisciplinary teams
• These working groups focus on
• biological processes
• temperament and emotional regulation
• memory, language, and literacy
• family and intergenerational relationships
• child care, community, and culture

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The Durham Child Health Development Study

• Between August 2002 January 2004,
• enrolled 207 families
• Four cell design (Race/Ethnicity by SES)
• Over sampling in higher risk
• Home or Laboratory Visits every 6 months
• Wide Range of Measures
• Designed to longitudinally examine core
  components of emotion regulation and language
  development
• Both of which have proved critical for transition
  to school

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Working Group Biological Processes

• Genetics
• Examining the interplay between specific genes
  with known relevance to neurological development
  and the early neonatal environment in which they
  are expressed.
• Cortisol
• Studying the developmental processes underlying
  the development of the HPA system with emphasis
  on joint contributions of child factors (e.g.,
  temperamental dispositions) and maternal factors
  (e.g., sensitivity and depression).
• Vagal Regulation
• Investigating the development of the autonomic
  nervous system as it relates to emerging emotion
  regulation capacity

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Working Group Temperament and Emotion

• Examining behavioral and physiological measures
  of emotion regulation at 3, 6, 12, 18, 24, 30,
  and 36 months
• Interested in emerging patterns of reactivity and
  regulation to distress and frustration in young
  children.
• New Directions
• Investigating maternal behavioral and
  physiological reactivity and regulation to
  examine concordance between mother-infant systems
  and the pathways to transgenerational
  transmission of these stress responses
• Exploring the relationship between distress and
  coping behaviors as a function of the
  physiological discordance between the
  parasympathetic and sympathetic systems for
  children with different attachment histories
• Examining early emotion regulatory strategies and
  emerging executive functioning abilities
  interested in processes related to attention
  shifting and control

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Working Group Language and Memory

• Assessing age-appropriate fundamental memory
  abilities such as working memory, long-term
  memory, and prospective memory
• Interested in impact of mother-child
  conversations about past experiences
• Studying expressive and receptive language and
  emergent literacy
• Goal is to identify patterns and pathways of
  development, link those patterns and pathways to
  relevant biological and environmental variables,
  and use this complex model to explore successful
  and unsuccessful transitions into the school
  environment.

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Working Group Family and Intergenerational
Relationships

• Studying the role of cumulative risks stemming
  from parenting, relational, neighborhood, and
  work stress on parental sensitivity
• Examining the role of social support and mental
  health as moderators of the relationship between
  cumulative stress and sensitivity
• Examining the role of early exposure to parental
  conflict on the development of the child stress
  response

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Working Group Child Care, Community, and Culture

• Examining the effects of child care quality and
  family processes on children's language
  development and early school readiness skills at
  age 3
• Testing whether quality of care impacts the
  development of high risk children more than other
  children
• Exploring if a difference between the child
  rearing beliefs of parents and caregivers impacts
  childrens early language and cognitive
  development
• Combining ethnographic and quantitative analysis
  to create innovative models of data integration
  that portray multiple levels of influence on
  child development

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Connections Across Working GroupsScientific
Innovations
Working Groups
Papers
Biological Processes
Parents' Selection of Infant Care Associations
with Ethnicity, Income, Parenting Stress,
Employment Stress, Child Temperament, and Care
Preferences
Emotion Regulation
Maternal Physiological Stress Regulation as a
Resource for Effective Parenting
Effects of Cumulative Stress on Fathers
Involvement in Parenting
Mother and Infant Physiological Concordance
During the Still Face and Arm Restraint Paradigms
Early Influences on Infant Memory Development
Language and Memory
Family Processes
Childcare, Community, and Culture
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Other Impacts

• Scientific and Training-Related
• The 8th International Institute on Developmental
  Science was held in Chapel Hill in May, 2005, and
  involved scholars from Sweden, Finland, Canada,
  The Netherlands, and numerous US universities
• Out of this institute will come a Special Issue
  of the Journal Developmental Psychobiology
• Provides enhanced opportunities for ongoing
  collaboration and multidisciplinary training
• Policy and Intervention-Related
• Research to inform No Child Left Behind
• Relation to Family Life Project

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Supplementary Funding

• Ginger Moore
• RO3 Child Emotion Vagal Regulation and Response
  to Exposure to Parental Conflict
• Liz Pungello Steve Reznick
• RO1 Family Factors, Childcare Quality, and
  Cognitive Outcomes
• Gilbert Gottlieb
• Genomic Sequencing
• Peg Burchinal Debra Skinner
• Integrating Qualitative and Quantitative Methods
  in Longitudinal Measurement Analysis
• Clancy Blair, Mike Willoughby, Peg Burchinal
• Executive Functioning

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Future Funding Plans

• Focused Follow-ups as Children Become School-age
• New Study