Friday, May 8, 2009

My children are guinea pigs

Living in a university town, there are lots of opportunities for the boys to get involved in studies. They are both on the lists at Psychology and Optometry, so we get calls from time to time to participate in studies. They don't seem to mind, it gives us something to do, and we are helping research.
We just agreed to participate in a study involving sleep habits of toddlers. It will be a week-long project, including 2 home visits (one around bedtime) and a lab visit, plus sleep diaries. It will be interesting to see how things go. We'll do the study at the end of the month (Wil has to be 2 1/2 to participate, which will be around Memorial Day). 
They have gotten some nice toys and books and t-shirts for helping, but it really is interesting to see what sort of studies are going on. Hopefully, we are helping researchers learn a bit about how children develop. The Optometry group is working to identify signs that a child sees double so they can correct it early, thus preventing a lazy eye from developing (I'm pretty sure that was the explanation). Psychology has several different groups, working on language development, behavior, all sorts of things. 
Pretty interesting stuff as you can see from the fun picture of Sam just before an Optometry study he did. 

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