Emotion Regulation in American Children

In order to compare the emotion regulation development and strategies of children in Ghana and the United States, it was necessary to collect an American sample. To do this, I was granted permission to conduct my study in two schools in Williamsburg. The first was DJ Montague Elementary School and the second was James Blair Middle School. These schools were chosen specifically in hopes that we would be able to collect a more ethnically diverse sample of students.

Working in schools is always fun because the kids are usually excited to be doing something new, however, there is also some stress involved working with principals, teachers, and secretaries who may not always be receptive to research. We were lucky that both DJ Montague and James Blair welcomed our research team into their schools!

In this post I will discuss the preliminary work needed to collect participants for the study.

First, IRB approval was sought through William and Mary. Next, we needed approval from the school district to go into the schools. Then, once this permission was granted we had to send home consent letters with students in order to obtain written consent from parents that their children could participate. The final step in this informed consent process was obtaining informed assent for the students before we interviewed them!

Hello! My first post will be to describe the process that has gotten me here and interested in emotion regulation research!

Over this past summer I had the opportunity through the Monroe Scholars program to travel to Ghana, Africa and both volunteer and conduct research. While I was there, I stayed with a host family who ran and directed a preschool, primary, and junior high school in Adenta, Ghana (a suburb of the nation’s capitol, Accra). I lived with 5 host brothers and 1 host sister (and a dog who had 6 puppies while I was there!). During the day, I volunteered in the school (of over 800 students) as a teaching assistant, substitute teacher, teaching sex education classes, and tutoring students. I had the most wonderful time imaginable and the kids I worked with just melted my heart! (I’ll post some pictures soon!) In addition to volunteering, I individually interviewed 140 students whenever I had the chance! I would pull students aside during lunch, break time, and sometimes before or after school to administer interviews which lasted about 20 minutes per child. During these interviews the child completed questionnaires about their emotion regulation strategies for the emotions of anger and sadness, how often they felt angry and sad, parent socialization of emotion, their incidence of depressed mood, and their levels of aggression.  Luckily for me, English is the national language of Ghana so a translator wasn’t needed!

This semester, I am working on an Honors thesis which seeks to compare emotion regulation processes in Ghanaian versus American youth. This semester was dedicated to collecting data for my American sample!