Alien Avatar Adventure

For 8- and 9-year-olds

This study will take place on a video call, live with a researcher! Clicking on the “Schedule a time to participate” button will send you to an online calendar where you can select a date and time that works for you.

Your child will be read multiple statements related to the process of making decisions (e.g., “Someone can make a good decision, but get a bad outcome because they were unlucky.”, “I make better decisions with others, rather than alone.”). Children will be encouraged to express their opinions about the statements and to rate the extent to which they think they describe them. We will also present children with short stories to explain these statements as a basis for the conversation. We are particularly interested in whether children can understand these statements and if they can be meaningfully related to their daily life experiences.

This work is part of a project which aims to develop a computerized task that can measure young children’s decision-making abilities. While there is a lot of work with older adolescents, no comprehensive assessment tools of decision-making exist for primary school children. In turn, this project can help researchers better understand how children’s decision-making abilities develop and help educators assess the impact of programs aiming to help children make better decisions. The complete survey will contain both self-report items (i.e., we ask children about how they make decisions) and behavioral items (i.e., we ask children to make decisions). The current session will help us determine the best self-report items to include on the basis of a structured interview (e.g., establish which items needs to be reworded, which sentences do not elicit reliable answers from children this young). Interested families will also be invited to participate in a second session including the behavioral items.

40 minutes

After you participate, we’ll email you a $10 Amazon.com gift code within five days to thank you for your time (only one per child). To be eligible for compensation we ask that you (1) provide a valid consent video at the start of the session (2) make sure your child is in the age range specified above and (3) ensure that your child is visible during the consent video. Your child does not need to finish the entire study in order to be eligible for compensation.