Stevie Gross
Research Mentor: Sabina Li
Mentor Department: Psychology, LSA
Author(s): Stevie Gross, Sabina Li
Session: Session 2 (10:00 AM – 10:50 AM)
Presentation Type: Poster 98
Abstract
This study delves into how children think of illness transmission in social contexts, as this information is critical in how we go further to teach children on proper hygiene practices and preventing illness. Focusing on children ages 5-12, with having 100 participants in total, 25 in each 2-year group, we run surveys at the Living Lab (University of Michigan Museum of Natural History and Ann Arbor Hands On Museum) through offline Qualtrics on iPads. As well, we have to take proper security measures working with children through consent forms and proper training. One aspect that is very crucial to our study is that we do not highlight actual illness. This means we never say people are directly sick or give any information about COVID or how germs spread. We want to find what children know without being primed. Our study is still ongoing, as we are still analyzing our results and gathering data, but through our collective experiences/patterns in data now implies that there are patterns of children responding to our questions as if we were talking about COVID or viruses, despite our questions not portraying anyone being sick. With our study, we hope to better understand what children know and what they think of illness. This could help organizations come up with more understandable and better hygiene practices for children. This could apply to schools, hospitals, and parents, which are crucial to children’s learning at a young age.
