Today I worked a lot on entering data for the PDEF study. I entered the parent information including the big 5 questionaire, family information questionaire, parent fantasy interview, and the children's behavior questionaire. It was really interesting to see how the children varied across these aspects of their lives. While entering the parent fantasy questionaire information, I was thinking that it would be really interesting to see how their interpretation of their child's imaginary friend lines up and relates to their child's interpretation of thier own friend. I also, made some confirmation calls for tomorrows appointments for PDEF and double checked that we were on schedule with calling and scheduling the right number of boys and girls in order to finish testing soon. I was unable to reach any of the families I called but I lest voice mails instead.
4/9 kristen j
No TrackBacks
TrackBack URL: http://blog.lib.umn.edu/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/185207
Great question, Kristen! Generally, we see quite a bit of variation between responses about imaginary companions from parents and children. For some kids, this could be because, for certain types of companions, children tend to play with the friend more than talk about it. It might also have to do with the fact that children's own stories about the companions are fluid. Although parents are sometimes not very reliable, we still like to get their stories about the child's companion(s) because children sometimes don't understand our questions and talk about real friends, they might make up a companion on the spot to please the interviewer, they might be shy and not talk about a companion they actually have, and parents give more detail about the companions than the children. If you're still interested in hearing more about this topic, let me know. We can chat about it next time you're in the lab and/or I can give you a few things to read.