Benefits of Research

Research on attachment has had a great effect on children and families.  The countless research on attachment has help create programs that support children and families.  Programs such as early childhood education program, parenting programs, or therapy based their services around research found on the importance of attachment.  I work for a non-profit organization where we offer all of those programs and because of research, we are able to have an organization with many different program have one common focus area, attachment.  This gives us the ability to reach out and help many in the community.

The one experiment that have always had a profound effect on me. Is the Still Face Paradigm.  This experiment, although hard to watch, tells us a lot about infant communication and caregiver’s responsiveness’s.  I encourage you to watch if you haven’t done so already.  You can see the experiment on youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apzXGEbZht0

Personal Research Journey

Recently my community has experienced some traumatic events.  Right before Christmas a young mother was shot and killed, leaving behind a three year old.  This week a 5 year old was killed during a drive-by shooting as she put her breakfast dishes in the sink.  Her 4 year old brother was in the kitchen with her and watched his sister pass away in their home. 

I have chosen to conduct by simulation research on the effects of trauma during infancy.  I choose this topic because of the violence that plagues the community I live in.  I’m concerned about the development of children, in particular infants, who witness or experience traumatic events.  I want to research how we can support children who have experience such tragic events such as those our community has experienced in the last month.  My hopes is that learning how to support these children will help break the cycle of violence. 

Through this simulation process, I have gathered several research articles that discuss children and violence, mostly children and/or infants who have experienced domestic violence.  Completing the research chart has help me to understand the design of research and why one way may be choosing over the other one.  I am interested and open to other research that may help with my simulation research.  At this point, I have only used information from the Walden Library and I’m curios if others are using just the Walden Library, use other web resources, or a combination.