Joint Attention in Parent-child interactions as a predictor of later language development in a low-income African setting.

The data from this project originates from the SUNRISE project (Scaling Up Nurturing care, a Radio Intervention to Stimulate Early child development), originally a cluster radio intervention to promote responsive care in Burkina Faso. The SUNRISE project utilised fifteen geographical ‘clusters’ to establish the effectiveness of radio broadcasts targeted at improving care practices in households (7 control and 8 intervention clusters). As part of the SUNRISE research, videos of parent-child interactions were recorded within the family home or close surrounding areas when children were 18-20 months of age. Dyads were recorded completing four tasks: reading a picture book, playing with blocks, sharing a meal and cleaning up from a meal. The full results of the original study are currently under investigation, but the present project specifically focuses on novel coding of joint attention in videoed caregiver-child interactions. For each three-minute task, thirty 6-second intervals will be assigned to each parent and child actor in the dyad, categorising their engagement as Jointly Engaged, Solo Engaged, or Disengaged. It can be expected, based on previous studies, that greater time both parent and child spend in Joint Attention can be predictive of more positive language development outcomes (Tomasello & Todd, 1983). However, this literature has largely been centred around Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) populations. Sub-Saharan Africa has been specifically identified as having the highest prevalence of children at risk of poor development, with over 60% of children under the age of 5 in Burkina Faso being at risk for poor development (Lu et al, 2016). It is not clear, therefore, whether findings can be related to our rural, low-income, Burkinabe population. Joint attention was made a specific focus in the project due to its micro-level objectivity (and thus reduction of Western-centric bias of affect) and the limited existing literature of joint attention in sub-Saharan Africa. This could suggest the present project provides unique value in the field of developmental psychology.