Blogging about child development

The aim of these activities was to encourage other child development researchers to engage with the public about child development research, whether their own or others research.

Some of the participants conveyed feedback that they hadn't previously appreciated the wider benefits of blogging including raising their profile, opening up participant recruitment avenues and improving impact of research and their general ability to be able to demonstrate the impact of their own research with the obvious positive implications for research funding applications.

In the workshop, we discussed four examples of blog pieces I have written about the representation of child development research in the media for the blog Research the Headlines.  We discussed research examples that had looked at the topics of 'praising children', 'growing out of ADHD', 'identifying autism in infancy' and 'use of iPads by young children'. The media focus of Research the Headlines means a key focus of those posts was to address any misrepresentations that had occurred in the media and to highlight examples where good reporting practices had been followed.

From the perspective of the workshop the range of child development posts discussed highlighted some of the key aims of blogging about psychological research more generally than a media focus. One of the most important contributions blogs can make is in getting the key findings of what is often written up in a fairly complicated journal article format out to the public in an accessible manner.

In the workshop we discussed ways in which a blogger can facilitate the public's knowledge about what the key measures and methods used in research studies involve. In the blog post I had written about 'praising children', for example, there had been confusions in the media about what was meant by 'praise'. The particular study had explored narcissism and it was important here to explain what narcissism specifically meant and how it was measured giving examples of some of the questionnaire items (e.g. "kids like me deserve something extra") to ensure the reader really understood what was specifically being examined in the study.

Other important areas that were highlighted were the role of the blogger in setting the context of the study in relation to the broader literature, exploring what the particular study findings mean in the context of related research on the topic. Here is where the blogger can help contextualise and bring together related research findings to inform understanding of the particular topic. This was achieved in the post about ADHD by contextualising the diagnosis rates reported within other studies.

The workshop ended with discussion of caution of acting as an annoying 'third reviewer' that clearly no one really wants! There may be aspects of a study that limit generalizability for example. In the example 'identifying autism in infancy' blog post, caution had been raised about sample size but we discussed how this can be focused on the positive. This was shown in this example post where reference was made to the authors current work in following the study up with a larger sample.