Images of Children and Adults for Health Research

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Abstract: This project's goal of expanding the extant archive for a major longitudinal study to include an innovative collection of images of children and adults is well-aligned with the initiative (PAR-16-149) to support the archiving of NICHD-funded data sets for secondary data analyses. The longitudinal study was funded through a U01 partnership with NICHD, and the images that will be added to its archive can take longitudinal and intergenerational health research in significantly new directions. As background, the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (SECCYD) was a major investment of NICHD in a longitudinal study of children and parents. The observational, survey, medical, biological, and video data from the NICHD- sponsored data collection over 15 years are archived at the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), with data collection on the now-adult sample ongoing. A current R01 project by the PIs of this proposal has developed a systematic process for extracting and rating “short slice” images of children and parents from videos. This system has resulted in short slices of children at 11 time points, short slices of mothers at four time points, and ratings of the attractiveness of their faces and bodies at all these time points. The child ratings—along with a detailed codebook—are already being added to the SECCYD archive through the current R01 so that health scholars licensed with ICPSR can merge them with the SECCYD for analyses of child and adolescent development. The proposed R03 would allow a substantial and valuable expansion by also archiving the actual short slices of children, extracting short slices of mothers at the remaining time points, extracting the short slices of fathers at the five time points they were videotaped, and adding all of these short slices to the archive along with expanded codebooks. The PIs are partnering with ICPSR to open up their secure system for housing and organizing these images so that other researchers could use them for their own purposes and not have to travel to the ICSPR data enclave. Such an enterprise would exploit the original R01 project to realize substantial economies of scale in creating a resource for health research to inform a wide array of health and health-relevant literatures. Indeed, a substantial body of research has documented the valid and reliable ways that images of the face and body can be used. For example, scholars could access this expanded SECCYD archive to examine the development of health conditions (e.g., obesity), the corrosive effects of disadvantage on health (e.g., the physical toll of poverty), the link between social stigmas and health (e.g., colorism and depression), family health dynamics (e.g., disjunctures in health of parents and children), and other important questions concerning individual and population health. They can also go beyond human rating to exploit new machine scoring techniques that enable measurements beyond the human eye that provide insights into biological processes (e.g., hormone levels, sexual dimorphism). The codebooks will also provide a template for other scholars to expand their own NIH-funded data collections or to launch new ones.