Pictures from the past.

[rivka]

I never got around to presenting my dissertation data at the primary conference in my field - mostly because by the time I finished the damn thing, the research I was doing was completely separate from my dissertation topic. I always had HIV stuff to present at the Society of Behavioral Medicine. Besides, it's not a conference that tends to bring in many people with either child/developmental interests, or disability interests, so my dissertation topic was off the beaten track for the meeting.

But this year I thought, what the hell. I submitted an abstract based on my dissertation research, and it was accepted for presentation as a poster. (I knew I wasn't going to be offered an oral presentation, given the off-the-beaten-trackness.) Now I'm putting the poster together, which means, among other things, that I pulled out the photos of misbehaving children which I used for our analog measure of abuse potential.

There's a lot more information about the analog task at that link, but essentially, we showed parents slides of various child behaviors and asked them how they would respond. Some of the photos are normal kid stuff, and some of them are really not. There's a mix of normal behaviors, rule violations, destructive behaviors, and dangerous behaviors.

[photos removed]

I thought people might be interested in seeing the photos, so I uploaded about a dozen of them to my Flickr account. You can see the whole set here. (Photos have been taken down.)

Because they're research items, I'm only going to leave them up for a few days - so look now, if you're curious.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

The one I had an immediate emotional reaction to was the child playing with glasses because that is a constant issue in our house. Without thinking, my first impulse was to yell at the screen, "I've told you so many times, DON'T TOUCH GLASSES!"

It wasn't even my kid. The force of my reaction was a little scary.

Did you notice any difference in parents' reactions based on the ages of their children? Because while I was freaked out about certain things like the gun and the roof, they were more intellectual reactions, and not emotional ones.

[journeywoman.livejournal.com]

Phoeey. That was me not logged in.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

The morning after the first day we had Sarah, we had a quiet moment together on the hotel bed. She lay quietly for a half minute, then she went for my glasses.



I remember thinking, "Oh oh, I hope she doesn't do that again."

She stopped after a couple of years.

[naomikritzer]

Oh my gosh, that's a cute picture.

I have two kids. Teaching them not to grab glasses off my face was a looooooooong process.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Aww. That's a very sweet picture.

[sciamanna.livejournal.com]

I almost never wear contacts, except when I know I'm going to meet very young children :-)

I realize that this may not be practical for a parent...

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Did you notice any difference in parents' reactions based on the ages of their children? Because while I was freaked out about certain things like the gun and the roof, they were more intellectual reactions, and not emotional ones.

That's an interesting observation. I don't know if anyone's ever looked at that specifically.

I did worry about whether my group of disabled children's parents might have responded in a skewed fashion because their kids weren't physically capable of doing some of the depicted behaviors - which would have their responses more theoretical. So I split the disabled group into families with only disabled kids, and families that also had a nondisabled child, and there was no difference between them.