Absolutely! Please contact the Family Development Lab at (402) 472-5630 or email us at familylab@unl.edu if the appointment time that you scheduled no longer works for you. We appreciate as much advance notice as possible so that we can contact other families who might prefer your appointment time.

Absolutely! We would love for you to continue your participation in the study, and we are happy to work with you and your travel schedule.

It depends which appointment you are partaking in. Each appointment is estimated to take a different amount of time. Check our "Participation Details" tab for more information about your specific appointment.

One of our primary goals when you visit the lab is to observe how your family interacts on a day-to-day basis. Thus, we need sufficient time for you to engage in all kinds of different interactions you might have when you are at home, like playing with toys and having a snack together. Further, we are interested in a range of health outcomes for your family, including your physical and emotional well-being, and the various experiences you might have that impact your health. Therefore, we collect a lot of information using different methods (e.g., surveys, interviews) in order to get the best snapshot of how things are going for you and your family.

When your child is 1 year of age, we complete a series of tasks that have been used for decades in research on child development. This allows us to compare responses from our families to other families from across the country and the world. Some of the tasks are designed to elicit emotions like frustration for a short period of time, just like your child might experience at home. For example, during one task, we put a toy behind some plexi-glass, which might frustrate your baby momentarily, but then we let him or her play with the toy afterward. Other tasks are intended to make your baby laugh and smile. For example, when we put on a puppet show.

Unfortunately, we cannot provide specific feedback for your child. The information we collect from you is not intended to be examined at the individual level. Rather, we combine information from all of our families and examine it all together to draw conclusions. However, we are happy to provide referrals to professionals in the area who can conduct individualized assessments of your child and provide detailed feedback.

During one of your visits, a member of our research team will ask to rub a small swab inside your child’s mouth to collect cheek cells. These are used to look at genetic variants that have been shown or are thought to be linked to specific child behaviors. We will not use the DNA for any other purpose, and we will not share the results of the genetic test with you or anyone else. They are not intended for individual feedback.

Any information collected during the study that could identify you will be kept strictly confidential. The information is stored in a locked cabinet or on a secure server, and will only be seen by the principal investigator and trained members of her research team. To help protect your confidentiality, we use ID numbers instead of your name to identify the information. Eventually, we will publish the results of the study in scientific journals or present results at scientific meetings; however, only information that has been generalized across the entire group of families will be presented. We would never present information from a particular family.