Baby's Online Live Database: An Open Platform for Developmental Science

Abstract

Efficient data collection in developmental studies is facing challenges due to the decreased birth rates in many regions, reproducibility problems in psychology research, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, we propose a novel platform for online developmental science research, the Baby's Online Live Database (BOLD), which extends the scope of the accessible participant pool, simplifies its management, and enables participant recruitment for longitudinal studies. Through BOLD, researchers can conduct online recruitment of participants preregistered to BOLD simply by specifying their attributes, such as gender and age, and direct the participants to dedicated webpages for each study. Moreover, BOLD handles participant recruitment and reward payment, thereby freeing researchers from the labor of participant management. BOLD also allows researchers the opportunity to access data that were collected from participants in previous research studies. This enables researchers to carry out longitudinal analyses at a relatively low cost. To make BOLD widely accessible, a consortium was formed within the Japan Society of Baby Science, where members from diverse research groups discussed the blueprint of this system. Once in full-scaled operation, BOLD is expected to serve as a platform for various types of online studies and facilitate international collaboration among developmental scientists in the near future.

Keywords: COVID-19; developmental science; longitudinal study; online study; open science; reproducibility; survey at home.

Figure 1

(A) An example of an interface for the participant management system implemented with Java language. In this screen, experimenters can select target babies/children based on the scheduled experiment dates and expected participants’ age at the scheduled dates. (B) Type of experiment to be integrated with Baby’s Online Live Database (BOLD).

Figure 2

Age-dependent change of most interesting topics regarding (A) child’s problematic behavior, (B) child’s education, and (C) child’s temperament. The vertical axis represents the proportion of respondents who chose the topic out of all respondents in each age-group.