Parenting and Inequalities in Early Child development: Experimental evidence (PIECE )
Research team:
- Carlo Barone, CRIS, LIEPP, Sciences Po
- Alex de Carvalho, LaPsyDÉ, Université Paris Cité
- Laudine Carbuccia, PhD student at the CRIS, LIEPP, Sciences Po
Abstract
This study develops an RCT (randomized controlled trial) to test a parenting intervention aimed at promoting the language development of young children aged between 6 months and 2 years old of low-SES parents. This study provides two major innovations. First, it improves over previous similar interventions, which delivered information on effective parenting practices to parents assuming that such information would be sufficient to modify their behavior. Most previous RCTs testing these parenting interventions have reported null or small effects on language development. We argue that this is because these interventions largely neglected the role of parental stress, present orientations (i.e. the tendency to give excessive weight to immediate payoffs compared to more distant payoffs) and default biases, that is, previous interventions largely neglected behavioral barriers inhibiting receptiveness to information on effective parenting among socially disadvantaged families. Relying on a partnership with the NGO ‘1001 mots’ (see e.g., http://1001mots.org), this study assesses the efficacy of a novel intervention methodology integrating a behavioral framework boosting a focused set of parenting practices by enhancing parental motivation and self-efficacy, and by providing personalized support and feedback to parents, helping them to deal with behavioral barriers and stress factors. We argue that this novel intervention methodology might offer a more effective way to modify parenting practices.
Second, we introduce a methodological innovation over most previous studies, which were based on self-reported measures of parenting practices typically derived from survey questionnaires. Survey questionnaires administered to parents are known to be plagued by social desirability bias, that is, parents tend to overstate their engagement in skill-enhancing activities with their kids. We introduce a novel measurement design that integrates parental questionnaires with recordings of parent-child conversations at home. This new design makes three key contributions: a) relying on a methodology developed in the context of the IDEE project (https://www.idee-education.org), we test a new recording protocol presenting a high degree of social acceptability for families and low intrusiveness; b) thanks to a partnership with the research team of A. Cristia (ENS / PSL Paris), we use a recently developed software called ALICE (Rasanen et al. 2019) to produce indicators of parental language stimulation and child speech; c) we complement these automated indicators with a set of manually-coded indicators of more qualitative dimensions of the linguistic input children are actually receiving in their everyday lives (e.g.,parental warmth and responsiveness) relying on a methodology developed by the NEPS team (Blossfeld et al. 2019). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study complementing parental questionnaires with both automated and qualitative indicators derived from direct observations, thus providing a far richer analysis of parenting practices and of language stimulation in young children.
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Publications of the Research Group
- Agnès VAN ZANTEN, Amelia LEGAVRE, Engineering access to higher education through higher education fairs- LIEPP Working Paper, n° 22, April 2014
- Nina GUYON, Elise HUILLERY, Choix d’orientation et origine sociale : mesurer et comprendre l’autocensure scolaire LIEPP Report décembre 2014
- Agnès VAN ZANTEN, Alice OLIVIER, Les stratégies statutaires des établissements d’enseignement supérieur. Une étude des « journées portes ouvertes » , LIEPP Working Paper n°40, novembre 2015
- Yann ALGAN, Elise HUILLERY, Nina GUYON, Comment lutter contre la violence et le harcèlement à l'école et au collège ? LIEPP Policy Brief n°19, juin 2015
- Laura Perna, Improving Higher Education of All Students: Lessons from the United States , LIEPP Working Paper n°48, February 2016
- Nina GUYON, Elise HUILLERY, Biased Aspirations and Social Inequality at School: Evidence from French Teenagers , LIEPP Working Paper, n°44, January 2016
- Nina GUYON, Elise HUILLERY, Track choice and socioeconomic origin: measuring and explaining academic inhibition , LIEPP Policy Brief n°23, february 2016
- Carlo BARONE, Antonio SCHIZZEROTTO, Giovanni Maria ABBIATI, Giulia ASSIRELLI, Gender, information barriers and fields of study choice: a field experiment , LIEPP Working Paper, n°63, January 2017
- Carlo BARONE, Denis FOUGERE, Clément PIN, La lecture partagée: un levier pour réduire les inégalités scolaires? LIEPP Policy Brief n°44, septembre 2019
- Carlo BARONE, Denis FOUGERE, Clément PIN, Social origins, shared book reading and language skills in early childhood LIEPP Working Paper n°93, octobre 2019
- Clément PIN, Evaluation du Plan de simplification pour l'enseignement supérieur et la recherche LIEPP Report octobre 2019
- Giulia ASSIRELLI, Carlo BARONE, Emilio Chambouleyron, Reka Vonnak Shared Book Reading Interventions and Children's Skills LIEPP Working Paper n°98, december 2019
- Giulia ASSIRELLI, Carlo BARONE, Emilio Chambouleyron, Reka Vonnak Shared Book Reading Interventions and Children's Skills LIEPP Working Paper n°98, december 2019
- Jérôme AUST, Ulrike LEPONT, Les LABEX réinventés les appropriations paradoxales d'un instrument d'action publique en biologie LIEPP Policy Brief, n°42, Juin 2019
- Béatrice BOUTCHENIK, Pauline GIVORD, Olivier MONSO, How do restrictive zoning and parental choices impact social diversity in schools? LIEPP Working Paper n°105, February 2020
- Laudine CARBUCCIA , Interventions to foster academic aspirations adjustment among disadvantaged and female students - A PRISMA systematic review of literature , LIEPP Working Paper n°114, Novembre 2020
- Clément PIN, Évaluation d'un plan national de simplification administrative. Le cas de l'enseignement supérieur et de la recherche LIEPP Policy Brief n°50, Mars 2021
- Marco OBERTI, Mathieu ROSSIGNOL-BRUNET, Elise TENRET, Pauline BARRAUD DE LAGERIE, Yannick SAVINA Reconfiguration du champ des formations en sciences humaines en Île-de-France : le poids de la sélection LIEPP Working Paper n°121, Juin 2021
- Pauline GIVORD, How age at school entry affects future educational and socioemotional outcomes: Evidence from PISA. LIEPP Working Paper n°120, Mai 2021
- Pauline GIVORD, Qu'est-ce qu'un bon lycée ? Questions de mesure LIEPP Policy Brief n°54, octobre 2021
- Bastian BETTHAUSER, Anders BACH-MORTENSEN, Per ENGZELL, A systematic review and meta-analysis of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on learning LIEPP Working Paper n°134, May 2022
- Pauline GIVORD, Francesco AVVISATI The learning gain over one school year among 15-year-olds: An international comparison based on PISA Sciences Po LIEPP Working paper, July, 2022
- Laudine CARBUCCIA, Carlo BARONE, Coralie CHEVALLIER, Valentin THOUZEAU Unequal access to early childcare : What role do demand-side factors play ? A PRISMA systematic review LIEPP Working Paper n°138, 2023
- Olivier MONSO, Audrey FARGES Fréquenter l'internat à l'entrée du lycée a-t-il un impact sur la réussite scolaire ? Une évaluation sur les lycées publics de l'Éducation nationale LIEPP Working Paper n°141, 2023