Description
A vast body of literature has shown the importance of caregiver touch qualityduring the first year of the infant’s life, with studies documenting its importance in the years beyond infancy. Despite its relevance, there is a lack of assessment tools for caregiver touch quality on the direct observation of child-caregiver interaction.
Here we describe the development and preliminary validation of an observation
of child-caregiver touch interaction tool for use in dyadic observation with 2-5-year-old children in semi-structured tasks. The tool, Caregiver-Child Affective Touch Assessment (CCATA) is comprised of 7 qualities of touch that can fall into three categories: (1) Positive, (2) Negative, and (3) Neutral Affective Touch. The participants were 20 children from an at-risk sample, with ages ranging from 2 to 4 years old (M = 34.80 months; SD = 7.84; 65% females) and their caregivers.
Adequate reliability was found for the CCATA observational measure. The
correlational analysis documented the construct validity via positive significant
associations with Adult Sensitivity and negative significant associations with Adult Non-Intrusiveness and Structuring, as measured by the Emotional Availability Scales (EAS). This study also found a negative significant association with Harsh Discipline. Based on the results, a further validation of the CCATA observational measure is suggested with other samples, as this proved to be a promising tool to assess the quality of caregiver touch in caregiver-child dyads.
| Period | 17 Jul 2023 |
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| Examinee | Lídia Lídia Helena Lopes Carvalho |
| Examination held at |
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| Degree of Recognition | Master |