Parent-Child Analog Tasks Posted on January 15, 2008 Consecutive tasks in an experimental setting can provide data about behavior, says Howard Abikoff (bio).

Analog tasks that are used in the lab: I guess the best examples remain, as I mentioned before, parent-child interaction tasks where you might have a parent and a child in a small office for example and in which the parent and the child are working on a game or a task together.

And where perhaps there’s an interest in seeing how does a parent direct the child when they’re working on a task? And how does the child respond to mom or dad in terms of directions, in terms of any questions that might be asked, et cetera? So sometimes it’s easy to just have a parent and a child work on a puzzle together or a game.

On the other hand if there’s an interest in seeing how well children are able to comply with parental requests and the way in which parents make those requests, and those are often important questions, for example, when we’re working with children who are oppositional and perhaps they’re participating in a treatment study where we’re trying to improve parenting skills around that very issue, well then we might try to set up an analog task in which the parents are asking the child to do something.

And the something may not be something in fact that’s terribly attractive to the child, like helping to clean up in that setting after they had been working on the task, and that’s something that often might create difficulties at home. Well now we have an opportunity to see how that unfolds in the laboratory setting, so that’s an example as well of how you might set up an analog to capture an aspect of functioning that is hopefully clinically relevant and depicts the way in which that might unfold outside of the laboratory.

« Back to Article