Measuring socioemotional functioning in a national birth cohort study

Abstract

An accumulating body of research suggests that the capacities children acquire that prepare them for learning in formal educational settings are multilevel and complex with multiple contributing factors that begin in infancy. A new U.S. longitudinal study, the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Birth Cohort (ECLS-B), is designed to enable researchers to examine how an array of children's capacities and skills function individually and jointly to promote or hinder the acquisition of school readiness. The ECLS-B follows a nationally representative sample of 10,688 children born in the U.S. in 2001. Baseline data on the children and their families were collected at 9 months of age with follow-up at ages 2, 4, and kindergarten entry. Information on study children's socioemotional development is derived from several sources: videotaped mother-child interactions, parent interviews, and field staff observations. Because attachment is such an important indicator of children's socioemotional development during the toddler period, the study devoted considerable resources to designing an attachment measure. The Toddler Attachment Sort-45 (TAS-45) was designed to meet the need for a simple yet valid measure that did not require extensive training for field staff to administer easily. The TAS-45 generates the classical attachment categories and security and dependency scores.