Collaborative emotion interpretation: investigating participation and power in naturalistic parent-child emotion interactions in families participating in a non-profit outdoor education network in the United States

Abstract

As educational researchers have started to more deeply recognize the links between thought and emotion, two questions stand out as central to learning and development: How do children learn how to notice and interpret their emotional experiences? And, how do parents and educators help young children learn to navigate these processes in empowering ways? This study aimed to contribute to our understanding of how adults, particularly parents, support children learn how to interpret and navigate their emotions. Prior research has examined these dynamics experimentally in lab-based settings via a process called “emotion-regulation.” Over the last thirty years, fractured components of this emotion regulation process – “self-awareness,” “understanding causes and consequences of emotions,” “labeling emotions accurately,” and “expressing emotions appropriately” – have been widely incorporated into curricula to support students’ social-emotional learning (SEL). However, SEL research has been widely critiqued due to: 1) its lack of clarity around the processes responsible for producing long-term outcomes, 2) its neglect of social context and power dynamics in these frameworks, and 3) an over-emphasis on lab-based studies to the exclusion of studies with higher external validity. Using these critiques as a point of departure for the study of emotion in learning and development, my dissertation research centers social interaction around emotion by examining “emotion interpretation” as a collaborative process between parents and children, and begins to document the role of power and equity dynamics in these naturalistic interactions. Data was collected in the context of a research-practice partnership with the Free Forest School, a national non-profit organization and community network focused on bringing families together around outdoor play. This study employed a mixed methods design, using three distinct methodological approaches, to analyze video of naturalistic parent-child emotion interpretation interactions. 16 families fully participated in this data collection process. The participating parents were 36.75 years of age on average, with 15 self-describing as female and one as non-binary. When this sample was broken down by parents’ self-reported race/ethnicity there were 11 White, 1 Asian, 1 Native American, 1 Hispanic, and 2 multi-racial parent participants. All children who participated in this study were between the ages of 2 and 8 years old (as outlined in the study’s eligibility requirements) with a sample average age of 3.5 years old. The child sample’s gender composition was 9 boys and 7 girls. There were 12 white, 1 Native American, and 3 multi-racial children in our final sample. Children’s gender and race/ethnicity were reported by their parents. This study offered a critical first step towards capturing the understudied social level of analysis of emotion interpretation and navigation processes between parents and children in a way that is responsive to the current critiques of SEL research at large. This research also helps improve our understanding of emotion interpretation as a collaborative process (particularly for children still developing their independent abilities). It is also a theoretically necessary complement to prior experimental research which captures individual-level emotion regulation processes and non-spontaneous social emotion-regulation processes. This tri-method research study also yielded a tool, a coding scheme, to apply to naturalistic parent-child interactional data, that could contribute to the efficiency of data-processing in future work. Nineteen categories of parental responses that potentially contribute to children’s emotion interpretations in naturalistic interactions, as well as observable indicators of (in)equity in emotion interpretation and navigation dynamics, were identified and richly described. These findings have important implications for the descriptive portion of the theory-building process. Additionally, synthesizing findings from across these three methods offered insight for refining adults’ practices for supporting their children’s emotion interpretation abilities, as well as guidance about which types of responses are associated with more equitable (or even more child-driven) participation structures to support this growth. Overall, this research agenda made important contributions to the field’s larger goal of equitably supporting the social-emotional development and well-being of children.