SAMPLE COLLECTION

[Magdalena Smoczynska]

Dear ALL,

I am in the process of planning a rather large scale project of
sample collection of natural child-mother interaction.  Involved
are children living in the large city of Kraków (Cracow), Poland,
aged of ca. 30 months, coming from all social backgrounds.
Some of them are language delayed according to MacArthur
CDIs, some of them average. The latter are a control group for
the former.

We cannot spend much time in getting acquainted with the
families, and I have no experience with such situations: the data
collection I did so far involved long-term individual
collaboration when all the problems could be solved gradually.
Here we get mother and child in our Lab. We know each other
only via correspondence and previous repeated application of
MacArthur CDIs) since the child was 18 mo. old. I think, we
cannot keep them there more than 60 minutes. We intend to run
there some experiments and test items with the child (video- and
audiotaped), which will take up to 30 minutes (including getting
acquainted). Then we ask the mother for permission to pay them
a short visit at home in the coming days for a sample recording.
If she agrees, we will have a different problem (see Situation 2,
below).

Situation 1: RECORDING IN THE LAB
If she does not, we have to immediately arrange a short situation,
as close to natural as possible, in which she and the child could
be video- and audiotaped taped in our lab, in presence of a
person running a camera (on a static support), but no interfering
with them (we do not have a technical possibility to tape them
using a one-way mirror etc.). We have just one little room.

How to arrange this in order to get a good sample of their
conversation?  I would like to avoid the situation in which the
mother asks hundreds of questions in order to show how cute her
child is, reads books, asks the child to sing and recite nursery
rhymes etc. I want the child to be as little shy as possible. I
would prefer them to have something comparable to do together,
a suggested task or a toy set to explore? How to do it?

I am pretty much aware that possible procedures are strongly
culturally constrained, there are typically Polish conventions to
be followed, etc., but all kinds of ideas, hints, suggestions, and
warnings even coming from very different places could be of
relevance.

Situation 2. HOME VISIT
If the mother agrees to accept a home visit [most of them will - I
already made an inquiry via e-mail and most mothers accepted,
but of course mothers with email addresses are usually college-
educated], how to prepare its scenario, so that we do not have to
spend 3 hours with them, that the data collection appears to be
the central task, that the child is not too shy, in sum that good
data are collected in comparable situations?

I already discovered that it makes sense for us not to accept to
drink tea (which is rather a ritual thing in such a situation in
Poland), because mothers disappear for 15 minutes in the kitchen
to prepare it, whereas fathers keep us company saying little,
waiting for her to come back, refusing to give much info on the
child, saying “My wife knows better!” [I was really tempted to
say “Maybe in such a case you could be able to boil some water
instead of her?”...].  I decided that a much better choice would be
to suggest a cold drink. Refusing to drink anything would be
considered very impolite.

The data we want to obtain are not specific in any sense. We
want  to be able to assess  the general level of the child’s
language development. Due to the number of subjects to be
recorded and to the limited funds we have we cannot afford to
visit them several times.

Still another question concerns the length of a sample. We can
transcribe 15-20 minutes per subject. How long should be the
recording? 30 minutes?

I am certain many colleagues had to deal with such a problem
and will be willing to share their experience.

Thank you in advance.

Magdalena Smoczynska
Dept. of General and Indo-European Linguistics
Child-Language Reserach Lab
Jagellonian University
Krakow, Poland
my new e-mail address is: masmo at vela.filg.uj.edu.pl
The old one is working too, but it is over-spammed, and I prefer
the new one.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/info-childes/attachments/20040320/ab7bcabb/attachment.htm>