I want to run an online study and ask parents to provide information about their child who is between ages 8-17 years old. It is likely that some parents have more than one child in that range. What child we have to choose, the youngest or the oldest? it is not possible to randomize.
What I have done in the past is ask them to pick the child who had the most recent birthday.
In addition to the previous comments, I would suggest letting the parents choose the one they want to refer to, but also ask which one they refer to. And an interesting qualitative question would be to ask in the end why they chose this one.
thanks, Helen, This in online survey and we would like to investigate parenting factors in children's well-being. we have to ask parents to only pick one child. But I think if we let the parents to choose themselves they may always choose the child who is more problematic or who is the favorite child. WE unfortunately at this phase are not able to do an observation study, but maybe later use this data to use better approaches such as observations. and thanks George, your suggestion is also very interesting as you said it might be interesting to let the parent choose and ask later on why they choose that child. Thanks Miyuru, I think because it is an online study and we would like to keep it as short as possible, But it is possible for the parents if they want to do the online study again (this is a good point, we need to think about this that whether we want to let them do that or remove the duplicates for example by tracking the IP addresses).
I think the Idea of picking the kid who had birthday more recently is the best way of randomize and don't include any disturbing effect like "first born" (there may be strong influence/correlations between the birth order and wellbeing that could interfere with your main question). An other option would be to let the parents fill a question about the age and gender of each kid they have and finally program the survey to choose randomly one of the filled data-sets (and tell the parents for example: We have randomly choosen your daughter, who is 16 years old. Please answer the following questions about her:...). Good luck!
Thanks Eliana, For randomization I also do agree with you that the recent birthday approach is very effective. It would be great if we had the option to randomize, however, the online software that we are using does not allow us to do that.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Psychology