Brooke Vitulli ’22: Conclusions
Hello again everyone!
Unfortunately, my summer research experience has come to an end. I have learned a wealth of information regarding recruitment techniques, email etiquette, how to problem-solve a variety of situations with participants, and, most recently, data analysis. As a reminder, I hypothesized that parental response to children’s negative emotions will play a mediating role between parental coping mechanisms and children’s behavior. This may seem overwhelming at first glance, but I encourage you to read my first blog post to get a more expansive explanation about my research and my goals.
Since I am at the end of my research experience, I recently met with my faculty mentor, Dr. Kelly A. Warmuth of the Department of Psychology, to analyze various subscales of the Coping Strategies Inventory- Short Form (CSI-S), Coping with Children’s Negative Emotions Scale (CCNES), and the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL). On the CSI-S, I analyzed the express emotions, self-criticism, emotion focused engagement, and emotion-focused disengagement subscales. On the CCNES, I analyzed the expressive encouragement subscale. Lastly, on the CBCL, I analyzed the internalizing, externalizing, and social problems subscales. Over Zoom, Dr. Warmuth was able to share her screen and teach me advanced data cleaning and analysis techniques on SPSS software. We were looking to use linear regression between our three constructs: parental coping mechanisms, parental response to children’s negative emotions, and children’s behavior. However, before we can test for regression relationships, constructs must first be significantly correlated (meaning, if they aren’t related, then clearly one construct cannot be used to predict another in regression). In order to prove a linear regression, there must first be a correlation between constructs. After running the analysis on SPSS, unfortunately, there were no significant correlations between our mediator variable, which is parental response to children’s negative emotions, and the other two constructs. Therefore, we did not move forward with the next step of analyzing if there was a linear regression.
Although I did not find the results I had hoped for, this summer research experience has allowed me to learn new data collection and analysis techniques I may not have learned at this stage in my academic career. I look forward to continuing my work in the Family & Development Lab with Dr. Warmuth over the next school year and working on new projects within the lab.
I would not only like to thank the Center for Engaged Learning and Dr. Warmuth for providing me with this amazing experience, but I would also like to thank you for following me on this summer research journey. I hope you are all staying healthy and enjoying the end of summer!
Best,
Brooke Vitulli ’22
