Students Education Training in Emotional Connection

The purpose of this study is to develop and test educational modules designed to instruct students how to assess the quality and strength of mother-child relationships. The approach will use constructs of Emotional Connection that were used in development of an investigational observation-based screening instrument, the Welch Emotional Connection Screen (WECS). The WECS allows healthcare providers to rate the emotional connection of a mother-child relationship in just a few minutes of observed face-to face interaction, and shows preliminary predictive properties when performed in the first year of life.

Administration of the WECS involves watching recorded interactions of a child sitting face-to-face on the mother's lap, and scoring the interaction on sliding scales per 4 domains. During the WECS development, the Nurture Science Program of Columbia University Irving Medical Center created and coded hours of parent-child interaction videos. These videos will be used to assess and train the students (subjects) on rating mother/child dyads around emotional connection. Subjects will rate the quality of mother-child relationships in video training sets after completing one of two educational modules: A) a lecture-style webinar describing evidence base and instructions on how to score the WECS B) a guide written in Clear Explicit Translatable Language (CETL). Training set results of students in these groups will be compared to results of students who received no prior training. Training set results will be analyzed for the reliability statistic between student scores and key scores established by writer of the scale and PI. Subjects will then spend 3 months without further training in emotional connection or practice coding WECS. Subjects will then rate the quality of mother-child relationships for videos of dyads they hadn't previously seen. The main outcome of this study is the comparison of reliability statistics and maintenance between students who completed different educational modules.

Inclusion criteria

• graduate students from the Columbia University Irving Medical Center campus and from the Columbia School of Social Work

Exclusion criteria

• refusal to participate