NCT06550206

Toddlers' Responses to Strangers

The Malleability of Social Group Understanding in Infancy and Early Childhood

• Status: Recruiting
• Phase: —
• Study type: Observational
• Enrollment: 100 (estimated)
• Sponsor: University of California Santa Cruz · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 13 Months – 24 Months
• Healthy volunteers: —

Summary

The study will assess if toddlers show differences in stranger wariness according to race, temperament, social network diversity, and neighborhood diversity.

Detailed description

This study is investigating 13- to 24-month-old toddlers' reactions to meeting new people from familiar and unfamiliar racial backgrounds! Participation involves a 1-hour one-time visit to the researcher's lab, located on the UC Santa Cruz campus. The study itself will take about 20 minutes, but will ask for a 1-hour visit to make sure child participants feel comfortable in the new space. The study will video record as child participants interact with two adults, who will play with the child and offer toys. Parent participants will also be asked to complete two surveys, one demographic survey and one social network survey, so that investigators can better understand how the people children see in their daily lives relate to how participants react to strangers from different racial backgrounds.

Conditions

• Social Behavior

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	Children's stranger wariness response to strangers	Children will see two strangers, one from a familiar racial background and one from an unfamiliar racial background. Familiar race stranger will be from the same racial background as the child's caregiver and unfamiliar race stranger will not.

Timeline

• Start date: 2024-07-30
• Primary completion: 2025-10-01
• Completion: 2025-10-01
• First posted: 2024-08-12
• Last updated: 2025-03-11

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United States