Research in the Wild. Paul Marshall

book or a tablet screen is used for bedtime reading. Are there differences in their affordances and properties that affects the age old practice of parents and their children reading a bedtime story together? To answer this, they carried out a controlled experiment in a naturalistic setting. They came up with a number of indices to describe when children are reading and being read to, in order to see if there were any differences between shared reading of digital and paper texts. The measures they used were for: cognitive aspects (e.g., do they differ in their attentional engagement), interactive and affective aspects (e.g., are there differences in the warmth of mother-child interactions when reading screen and paper media?), and postural aspects (are there differences in the physical positioning of mother and child when reading from screens vs. paper?).

      The experimental design drew heavily from developmental theory and experimental design. The theory of joint attention was used to frame the design of the study to explore these aspects. An in situ study was then conducted to answer the questions—by observing and recording the joint attention between parents and children when sitting on a sofa together in their own homes reading a book at bedtime. Much thought went into the selection of the participants, the materials used, and the length of reading with the use of a repeated-measures design, using four conditions (Mother-Paper, Child-Paper, Mother-Digital, Child-Digital).

      Reading errors and recall of material were collected and then coded, providing specific measures of richness of description and narrative coherence. The findings from the study revealed a number of differences, for example, they found that reading interactions involving a screen showed slightly lower warmth than those with a paper book. However, tellingly, they found no differences in the narrative and descriptive aspects of story recall for stories shared on paper or screen, whether the mother or child was reading. Hence, in contrast to the lab experimental paradigm, where hypotheses that are found to be statistically insignificant are considered to be a failure and often not published, Yuill and Martin’s (2016) non-significant findings were very revealing in the naturalistic context—showing how the practice of bedtime reading was not any inferior when reading together from a tablet compared with a paper-based book.

      More generally, the study shows how it is possible to conduct a theory-driven experiment in the wild, based on a growing digitalization concern in society, without compromising the experimental design or the control in order to compare conditions. It shows the value of taking into account a wider set of concerns and using a broader set of measures than is usually done in lab experiments. Namely, the in situ study provides more ecological validity while demonstrating a wider appreciation of the factors that can influence children’s experience of naturalistic shared reading in everyday settings.

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