I am a clincial research fellow in child psychiatry and am
developing a test to assess the child's perception of emotional
relationships with important people in his/her life (such as friends
and other family members). A computer programmer and I are developing
software, programmed in C to run on DOS-based machine. Using this the
child can choose figures to represent important people in his/her life
and "give" or "post" answers to these people to questions about the
emotional aspects of relationships. In this way a grid is produced of
the child's responses to the questions for each family member / friend.
The questions will concern the quality and direction of different
emotions. For instance who the child loves and who the child beleives
loves them; towards whom the child feels anger / hate / etc. Now, this
pattern will clearly vary a lot and in itself may not tell us much
about the patterns of emotional relationships in children who, say,
develop emotional disorders compared with those who do not.
There will be additional questions asking the child if he/she would
like things to be different to how they are currently. My hypothesis
is that there will be a diffence between children with and children
without emotional problems with respect to whether they would like the
emotional content of important relationships to be different.
This is going to be very complex to analyse given that the number of
important people that each child chooses to include is going to vary.
However, the test is effectively measuring a difference and so
variations in the number of people the child chooses will cancel out.
I would be very grateful for any comments that anyone might have and
will be pleased to give more information about the proposed test should
you need it.
Andy
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Andrew Parkin: Greenwood Institute of Child Health, Univ. of Leicester, UK.
email: ap23@leicester.ac.uk