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Do you want to participate in child research studies? Join the ChIRP database!
Have you ever considered being involved or contributing to research, but had no idea how or where to get started or to go for such experiences? We know that getting involved with research can be hard and there can be so much going on at the University and in research that it can be a daunting task to find a study interesting and relevant to you or your family. We at the Child & Infant Research Participation group (ChIRP) aim to make being involved in child development research easy and accessible to families!
ChIRP is a group of researchers at the University of Alberta who share a specific interest in how children develop. We have studies involving Linguistics, Psychology, Education, Communication Sciences and Disorders, and Agricultural, Life, & Environmental Sciences - and more to come! As such, whatever your interest, we might have a study that will be interesting or relevant to you!
If you are interested in becoming involved with research, maybe signing up for our ChIRP database might be a step in the right direction! ChIRP is a list of potential participants that our associated labs will be able to contact for participation in our studies.
Now, you may have a few questions regarding ChIRP and what getting involved with research might entail. I aim to (hopefully) answer a few questions for you here:
Who are running these studies?
Who are running these studies?
As mentioned, ChIRP includes Linguistics, Psychology, Education, and Agricultural, Life, & Environmental Sciences. Take a look at the labs under ChIRP. Below, I’ll give you the websites for some of our labs.
Little Magpies Lab (for Infant Language Learning)
The Little Magpies Lab is based in the Department of Linguistics at the North Campus . This lab is interested in and focuses on how infants learn language from the ages of birth to about 3 years old!
Studies at the Little Magpies Lab are often interactive and involve presenting infants with fun and engaging images or videos and recording their answers. Little Magpies Lab also has some fun story telling tasks to engage parents with their children during studies!
The Centre for Comparative Psycholinguistics (CCP)
The CCP is also based in the Department of Linguistics at the North Campus. This lab conducts research with children aged 3-6 years old!
Studies conducted by the CCP are super cool as they often involve the use of non-invasive eye-tracking paired with engaging tasks! Being involved with studies with the CCP might be a fun experience that will contribute to child language research as well as some insight into recent technological developments in research.
The CROC lab is based in Faculté Saint-Jean, University of Alberta’s Francophone campus!
This lab conducts research involving children aged 3-12! This lab is interested in child cognitive and language development and the studies conducted in this lab are very fun and simple.
As a plus, every child who participates in a study with this lab will receive a prize! — isn’t that fun?
What about my privacy?
Your confidentiality is our highest priority! When you sign up to be a part of ChIRP, the information that you provide us with will be kept strictly confidential and will never be distributed to a third party. We take your privacy very seriously.
If you should decide that you no longer want your information in the ChIRP database, you are free to have your information removed at any time!
Additionally, your participation is entirely voluntary. If at any point you decide against participating in any of our studies you are absolutely free to withdraw at any point, no questions asked!
How will you use my data?
Once you have participated in our studies, any identifying information will be anonymized and will not be able to be traced back to you. Any data that we collect or record during the studies will be used only for research purposes within our institution. The results of the studies might be used for future student theses, papers, or presentations!
While the data will not be tied to you, you will have contributed greatly to further scientific findings? — We are very grateful for that!
Where do I go to participate? Do I have to leave my house at all?
Typically most of our studies occur at the University of Alberta North Campus, however with the pandemic, many labs have undertaken virtual measures (if possible) so there might be some opportunities of participating virtually through conferencing softwares!
If coming to the University campus feels a bit daunting, then fear not as the lab that you sign up for will provide detailed instructions on how to get to the lab. You will also be provided a reserved parking spot for the duration of your stay!
We will do our best to ensure that your experience is as stress-free as possible!
So, there is the run down of the ChIRP group and database! I hope that I have done a good job in providing a better look into our research database and that it feels just a bit less daunting and a bit more approachable to becoming involved and participating in our research studies!
We greatly value the individuals and families who participate in our studies and hope that we might be able to see you soon!
Rachel Tu
August 2022
MSc-SLP student at University of Alberta
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