Do you have a family dog?
Would
you like to be part of entertaining and cutting-edge research
with your child and your dog?
Recently, we carried out research in Lincolnshire schools on dog bite prevention, evaluating a part of the interactive and entertaining Blue Dog programme http://www.thebluedog.org. We found out that the programme works well to teach children how to behave safely with dogs. We are now carrying out a follow-up project evaluating the second part of the Blue Dog bite prevention programme with children from 3-5 years and would like to ask for your help.
What do we want to find out?
The Blue Dog stories teach children how to behave safely with
their dog. We now want to find out if 3 to 5 year old children
apply what they have learned from the CD with their own pet dog.
What does the study involve?
If you own a pet dog and would like to participate, we will give
you a free copy of the Blue Dog CD for your child to play with
and to keep after the study has finished. Half of the children
will receive the CD during the study, the other half afterwards.
To make our study as close to real life as possible, we then want to do the following:
Children can help us with
watching a few short animated clips to see if and what each
child has learned from the CD..
The testing sessions will take place once before and after they watch
the CD, and again after 8 weeks, after half a year and after a
year. We are repeating these mini-testing sessions as we have to
measure if the programme is effective: if the children keep the
knowledge for a longer period of time, it works well. We can
come and visit you at home or you can come to the Infantlab,
whichever is most convenient for you.
Parents can help by
filling out a short questionnaire
while the children are doing the testing sessions.
You and your child would take part voluntarily and you can
withdraw yourself and your child from the study at any time. All
information is treated confidentially and data will be rendered
anonymous. All researchers testing in schools are
police-checked, the school has given permission for the project
to be carried out, and ethical permission has been given by the
University of Lincoln by the start of testing.
The research is carried out together with Dr. Tiny De Keuster, Dr. Nelly Lakestani and Dr. Kerstin Meints (Head of Lincoln Babylab). If you require any further information please do not hesitate to contact us: If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact us at: bluedog@lincoln.ac.uk tel: 01522/886481.
We would be very grateful if you could help us with our studies and consent to your child taking part in our study!
Yours sincerely,
Kerstin Meints & Nelly Lakestani