Developmental Relationships Project

This project is led by Megan Shahnooshi, a first-year doctoral student and a 10-year veteran infant-toddler educator. Team members include Professor Junlei Li, Xiaoyue Dai, Arundhati Sural, and Maria Casas.

The Simple Interactions Tool has been used in professional development settings to support the ways in which we understand simple, human moments between individuals or groups of individuals. This project is focused on parent-child relationships in particular.

How do we uplift and “notice” the moments that matter in the research context?

Our project aims to test whether the Simple Interactions Tool could be adapted into a Qualitative Research coding measure, allowing for the strengths-based analysis of interactions between parents and children. While breaking down these interactions into qualitative codes, we avoid the presumption that certain interactions are more “valuable” than others. In contrast, we hope to develop tools that describe not prescribe, the quality of parent-child interactions.