The Multimedia Database for Developmental Studies at The Pacella Parent Child CenterÂ’s Observational Nursery.

GALARCE, EZEQUIEL; WILLIAMS, CHERYL; ANDRÉS J. ROUSSOS; WILMA BUCCI

Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association

American Psychoanalytic Association

Lugar: New York; Año: 2005 vol. 52 p. 1246 - 1247

0003–0651

The Pacella Parent Child Center (http://www.theparentchildcenter.org) of the New York Psychoanalytic Society is developing a unique archive containing a wide range of data on parent-child interaction that is available to qualified researchers. The data include audiotapes and videotapes of parents, children, and staff, interviews with mothers and fathers, and coded transcriptions of the audio material and questionnaires. The archive reflects the psychoanalytic focus of the investigators who designed it, but the data are of general interest for a wide range of investigations. The data are being organized in a centralized database, with emphasis on security and effective retrieval capabilities in response to particular questions. While over the past several decades many important studies have been carried out based on observations of mother-child interactions, to the best of our knowledge none has compiled a systematic archive including raw data together with findings potentially available for external use, and none has included the types of observations we include in our database. The research data are stored in the form of texts, codes, scores, and audio and video files linked by a common structure, with virtually unlimited possible connections among them. Researchers may thus link any form or unit of data—e.g., words, phrases, notes, scores, audio, or images—with any other variable contained in the database. Three major types of design problems, with both scientific and institutional implications, were addressed in developing this project: confidentiality of data; issues of electronic and other forms of transmission; and computer or database vulnerability. Technical solutions have been developed for these problems; problems of maintenance and administration of the database and the evaluation of potential users remain to be resolved. At present the data have been made available to a limited extent and only to researchers within the Pacella Parent Child Center. The data potentially enable the investigation of a wide range of questions in areas of psycholinguistics, cognitive development, and psychoanalytic developmental research. These questions include relations of the parent’s discipline style to the child’s aggression, movement toward autonomy, and affect regulation; relations between a parent’s capacity for symbolic expression and aspects of the parent-child emotional interaction, as well as the child’s capacity for symbolization as expressed in play; influences of the parents’ own problems of separation and attachment on their parenting styles at different ages (e.g., infancy vs. toddler years); and fathers’ contributions to understanding complex family dynamics. These questions can be examined through both cross-sectional and longitudinal designs. Such questions call for innovative research techniques requiring expertise beyond what is generally available in any one research group, often including collaborative and interdisciplinary designs. Our goal is to develop a database that will enable researchers to address these questions, while providing strict safeguards for the privacy of the participants who have made this database possible.