Clinical trial NCT04919343: Do Video Materials Help Parents to Support Infant Development?
Official title: A Randomised Controlled Trial to Evaluate the Efficacy of BBC Education's Tiny Happy People Content in Supporting Infant Language Development.
Study type: INTERVENTIONAL
Overall status: UNKNOWN
Phase: NA
Conditions: Language Development
Keywords: Vocabulary
socioeconomic status
Parenting
language
parent-child interaction
self-efficacy
infancy
Lead sponsor: University of Sheffield
Sponsor class: OTHER
Collaborators: name: University of Liverpool
name: University of Manchester
name: University of Melbourne
First posted: 2021-06-09
Enrollment: 435
Sex: ALL
Minimum age (years): 4
Maximum age (years): 9
Standard ages: CHILD
Accepts healthy volunteers: yes
Allocation: RANDOMIZED
Intervention model: PARALLEL
Primary purpose: BASIC_SCIENCE

Brief summary: The aim of this project is to assess whether video materials from the BBC Tiny Happy People (THP) campaign are effective in terms of improving the language skills of socioeconomically disadvantaged children before they start school. This project will also look at how useable the service is for parents in terms of acceptability, effects on self-efficacy and implementation of advice.

Detailed description: The current study will evaluate BBC Education's Tiny Happy People initiative (https://www.bbc.co.uk/tiny-happy-people) which seeks to reduce the impact of social and economic disadvantage on children's language skills before they arrive at primary school. BBC Education have created videos for parents and other caregivers with information about child development, tips and activities as well as other content of interest. The aim of the evaluation is to find out how parents feel about the materials and whether the videos promote a) caregiver confidence at 12, 18 and 24 months, b) caregiver-infant interaction at 12, 18 and 24 months and c) child language at 18 and 24 months. The primary outcome is expressive vocabulary size at 17-18 months. Families with 4- to 9-month-old infants who would like to take part will be randomly allocated either to a language support group or a physical health active control group and sent short, age-appropriate advice videos by text message three times a month until their children are 18 months old (with follow up videos for children until the age of 2 years where possible given study time limits).

Eligibility criteria: Inclusion Criteria:

Families must:

* be raising their child as a monolingual English speaker (at least 80% of the language they hear in the home is English)
* have a postcode in deciles 1-5 of the Office of National Statistics Index of Multiple Deprivation
* have access to the internet and a device to watch videos (via smart phone)

Infants must:

* be full term
* have a healthy birthweight

Exclusion Criteria:

Neither caregivers nor infants must have any significant known physical, mental or learning disability

Primary outcomes:
measure: 18 month expressive vocabulary
timeFrame: 2 months. Parents will complete the report within 2 months of the infant turning 18 months old.
Secondary outcomes:
measure: Caregiver responsive behaviour at 12, 18 and 24 months
timeFrame: Measures will be collected within 2 months of the child turning 12, 18 and 24 months
measure: Caregiver self-efficacy at 12, 18 and 24 months
timeFrame: Measures will be collected within 2 months of the child turning 12, 18 and 24 months
measure: 24 month expressive vocabulary
timeFrame: 3 months. Parents will complete the report within 3 months of the infant turning 24 months old.
Other outcomes:
measure: Intervention uptake - number of video links that were clicked on
timeFrame: Clicking on a video link within one month of it being sent
Locations:
city: Sheffield
country: United Kingdom
facility: University of Sheffield
state: South Yorkshire
Study officials:
affiliation: University of Sheffield
name: Danielle Matthews, PhD
role: PRINCIPAL_INVESTIGATOR
References: