NCT04919343

Do Video Materials Help Parents to Support Infant Development?

A Randomised Controlled Trial to Evaluate the Efficacy of BBC Education's Tiny Happy People Content in Supporting Infant Language Development.

• Status: Unknown
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 435 (actual)
• Sponsor: University of Sheffield · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 4 Months – 9 Months
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

The aim of this project is to assess whether video materials from the BBC Tiny Happy People (THP) campaign are effective in terms of improving the language skills of socioeconomically disadvantaged children before they start school. This project will also look at how useable the service is for parents in terms of acceptability, effects on self-efficacy and implementation of advice.

Detailed description

The current study will evaluate BBC Education's Tiny Happy People initiative (https://www.bbc.co.uk/tiny-happy-people) which seeks to reduce the impact of social and economic disadvantage on children's language skills before they arrive at primary school. BBC Education have created videos for parents and other caregivers with information about child development, tips and activities as well as other content of interest. The aim of the evaluation is to find out how parents feel about the materials and whether the videos promote a) caregiver confidence at 12, 18 and 24 months, b) caregiver-infant interaction at 12, 18 and 24 months and c) child language at 18 and 24 months. The primary outcome is expressive vocabulary size at 17-18 months. Families with 4- to 9-month-old infants who would like to take part will be randomly allocated either to a language support group or a physical health active control group and sent short, age-appropriate advice videos by text message three times a month until their children are 18 months old (with follow up videos for children until the age of 2 years where possible given study time limits).

Conditions

• Language Development

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	BBC Education Tiny Happy People videos	This intervention involves regular texting of BBC Education Tiny Happy People videos to parents
BEHAVIORAL	Physical health control intervention	This intervention involves regular texting of publicly available videos about supporting infant physical and dental health to parents

Timeline

• Start date: 2021-09-14
• Primary completion: 2022-11-30
• Completion: 2023-05-31
• First posted: 2021-06-09
• Last updated: 2022-04-20

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United Kingdom