When I first started brainstorming ideas for my research project, I had no clue what I wanted to do. I always had an interest in doing something with Bluey after watching another student’s project from the previous year where she watched children's animated movies. Likewise, Bluey had always piqued my interest; while it’s technically a children's show, it quietly yet effectively shows that that's not the case by including deeper topics such as divorce, miscarriages, the struggles of motherhood, and more. Bluey also highlights what a regular family’s day-to-day life might look like instead of following a strict formula, thus making meaningful and relatable connections with its audience. 

At first I wanted to see if I could tie Bluey in with psychology as that’s what I want to study in college. Specifically, I thought it would be interesting to look at how Bluey influences its audience, including young children and their parents, if children picked up on some of the darker themes present in Bluey, or if children are actually using the lessons from Bluey within their own lives.  

Upon starting my research, I found a lot of sources that talked about the “play” present in Bluey, or the make-believe games Bluey, her family, and her friends play. For example, in one episode of Bluey called “Shadowlands”, Bluey and her friends have to navigate around the park by only stepping on the shadows created by the objects around them. Likewise, this imaginary play has been proven to aid in children’s motor and cognitive development (Schmitt). Likewise, many sources also highlighted the presence of adult messages and themes present in the show all while adapting them to a medium that children can understand. This allows both young and older audiences to connect with and relate to Bluey, helping them understand each other (Staff). However, after doing much of this research, I found that most of the topics I was looking at had been thoroughly researched. 

Instead, I started to look at what research had been done on other children's animated television shows, specifically Sesame Street, Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood, and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. By doing so, I stumbled upon the term social and emotional learning, or SEL. Most educational shows focus on SEL compared to academic subjects like math or English. According to the Collaborate for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, or CASEL, SEL the process we all go through to develop the skills, knowledge, and attitudes to manage our emotions, understand other's emotions, achieve our goals, show empathy, maintain relationships, and make responsible decisions for ourselves and others. Improving one’s SEL has been shown to improve academics and grades, one's mental health, and the number and quality of healthy relationships (CASEL). Furthermore, I found a paper that looked at the SEL content in multiple different shows and created a tool called the Social and Emotional Learning in Educational Children’s Television rating instrument, or SELECT for short (Christensen).

For my final project, I decided to look at the SEL content in every episode of Bluey using the SELECT tool. For each episode, I will code for when there is a SEL skill present (ex. helping others, naming ones emotions, etc.), how it was displayed (ex. characters talked about emotions, one character helped another pick up a heavy object, etc.), and an example of what was done. While research has been done on the SEL content in other children's shows, none has been one on Bluey specifically. Likewise, with Bluey's prevalence and popularity in today’s children's cartoon industry as well as its ability to positively impact children around the globe if there is a presence of SEL skills within it, it’s of the utmost importance that more academic research is done on it.  

Introduction

My research project is looking at the social and emotional learning skills in Bluey. This means that I’m watching all regular-season episodes of Bluey in order to determine how many times each skill is displayed throughout the show and if that number changes across seasons. I also want to find the most commonly occurring skill, which I hypothesized would be cooperating and helping based on the study I got my meathodology from by Claire G Christensen.

Progress

So far, I’ve watched 79 episodes of Bluey out of the total 150 episodes I plan to watch. I’ve finished all 51 episodes in Season 1 and have collected 104 data points among them. I’m currently at episode 28 of Season 2 and have collected 45 data points so far. I’m doing good at keeping myself on task in class and on time with my data collection. We’re a little more than halfway through data collection and I’m just barely half way through the episodes I need to watch. I feel that I might be a little bit behind, but nearly every day I’m coming into class and spending the entire time watching Bluey, which is usually 8-10 episodes per class. As long as I stay concentrated and work on data collection in class, I feel that I’ll easily finish by March. 

Likewise, as my research has gone on, it has become easier to use the SELECT tool to code for SEL skills. In other words, I feel like after watching so many episodes, it’s really easy for me to pick up on a skill I may have missed in the earlier stages of my research. Of course, single-coder error will always be a limitation in my study, but I feel more confident in my data knowing that I’m not missing as many skills as I might of been beforehand.