Consistency and Convergence of Two-Caregiver Report of Children's Media Consumption: A Longitudinal Approach
Advisor: Catarina Vales聽
Major: Neuroscience
Abstract
Developmental scientists often rely on a single report from one caregiver to measure behavioral outcomes. However, because each caregiver might observe only a subset of a child鈥檚 experience and because everyday routines change over time, this practice might lead to fragmented data. Thus, reevaluation of this approach is necessary to ensure that caregiver responses accurately capture developmental outcomes, especially for context-dependent behaviors like media consumption. In this proposal I address this timely question by evaluating the convergence of two-caregiver reports in the domain of media consumption. I will recruit a sample of 30 two-caregiver dyads and analyze the consistency and convergence of their monthly reports on their 3-6-year-old child鈥檚 media consumption over a 6-month period. In addition, I will collect time-use data to understand whether media consumption changes over time due to school year and routine shifts. I expect that, while each caregiver might offer unique information, we will still see agreement at the media content level. Furthermore, I expect to see sample-level agreement both within and across timepoints, with changes in everyday routines leading to lower cross-time agreement. This project will also serve as the basis for future work looking at the convergence of parental reports with complementary ground-truth measures of media consumption, and towards developing accurate ways of aggregating across multiple caregiver reports of media consumption 鈥� helping me prepare for my graduate career.
Bio
My name is Ish Acharya, and I am a rising senior in Dietrich College studying cognitive neuroscience! I have worked in the Cognitive and Social Development lab under Dr. Catarina Vales since the summer of 2024, working primarily on projects related to children鈥檚 media consumption and how that in turn influences their ideas about social identities. My research interests are primarily focused on applying a family ecology lens to understand how media and other forms of cultural learning influence children鈥檚 perceptions of themselves and others, particularly in relation to social identities. I am also passionate about developing more rigorous research methods in developmental science to help answer critical questions. In my free time, you can often find me consuming media on my own, whether it be reading humorists like David Sedaris, watching high-brow films like "Mean Girls", listening to Beyonc茅, or discussing the latest pop culture and political happenings in North America.