1/5, HEAL Consortium: Establishing Innovative Approaches for the HEALthy Brain and Child Development Study

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The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the mental and physical health of children and their parents. The pandemic has also affected the ability to conduct in-person research at most institutions across the United States. However, recent technological advances may allow many in-person assessments to transition to virtual formats. There is an urgent need to develop virtual versions of currently used assessments of the home environment and parent-child interactions, and to concurrently study the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on family relationships. The proposed project seeks to address this urgent need by building upon ongoing research efforts among three sites from the NIH HEALthy Brains and Cognitive Development (HBCD) study: Arkansas Children’s Research Institute, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. We will develop and test a virtual version of the HOME Inventory in 90 mothers with infants between 6-18 months of age. We will validate this virtual version by performing in-person HOME Inventory assessments in 45 of these dyads. In all participants, we will use standard questionnaires to assess COVID-19 exposure and impact. Finally, we will examine associations between regional and temporal variations in COVID-19 exposure and impact and dimensions of the HOME Inventory. The results of this study will be used to finalize the development of a virtual HOME Inventory protocol that can be widely used in future studies, including the HBCD Phase II study.