I’m always looking to share research from developmental psychology with those outside academia, especially families with young children.
ABC Communities.
Starting in 2019, I helped set up a run a community engagement project identifying ways to support families with infants in St Andrews and East Fife, titled “ABC Communities”.
After meeting a variety of caregivers and those working with infants, I helped set up the “ABC Baby Bee”, an education and support group for caregivers of young infants. I also helped establish a Facebook page providing information about local events and resources.
This process is described in detail in a paper published in the journal “Research for All”.
Salter, G., Altdörfer, T., Brown, G. and Carpenter, M. (2021) ‘Meeting the challenges of public engagement, research impact and research participation as a baby and child lab’. Research for All, 5 (2), 420–37.
“Here we describe a low-cost, easy-to-implement, enjoyable and effective means of simultaneously addressing the challenges of recruitment, public engagement and research impact… [these challenges] not be competing pressures on researchers’ time, but can be mutually supporting aspects of the research process.”
Link.
Other community outreach.
I’ve also been involved a range of other outreach projects, from talking to primary school pupils about the benefits of exercise on the brain, to talking to teenagers about designing experiments in developmental psychology.
Working on Netflix’s “Babies”
I appeared on an episode of the Netflix educational documentary series “Babies”, titled “Relationships”. I helped recreate a study on on infant pointing.
To read an interview about my public engagement and research impact efforts (from the University of St Andrews Public Engagement team), click here.
All images are used with the consent of those appearing in them, or the consent of their caregiver(s).