Archiving parent-child, marital, and family social Interaction videotapes from a 33 year prospective study of the development of risk and resilience in a high risk population

ABSTRACT The Michigan Longitudinal Study (MLS) is unique for a number of reasons: (1) the study is the earliest beginning (age 3-5 for the proband group) high risk yet also population based family study (N= 460 families) of the emergence of substance abuse and other externalizing behaviors currently extant, (2) it is also the longest

running, having involved continuous assessment for 33-years; (3) the behavior of both biological parents as well as step-parent(s) (N=994) was assessed in parallel, and in overlapping domains with those assessed in the offspring (N=1091), (4) genetic data have also been collected; (5) for a substantial portion of the sample

(N= 340), neuroimaging (structural and functional MRI) has been carried out at multiple time points. (6) Assessment involved 95 measures covering 6 domains for the offspring and 6 for parents, with data collected at 3-year intervals for all participants, and also annually for the youth between ages 11 and 26. Data collection

formally ended in April of 2018. (7) In addition to questionnaires and ratings, in the early assessment waves real-time observation of parental, marital, and family interaction during standardized social interaction tasks was carried out and recorded by VHS videotape. This multi-level, multi-domain dataset permits characterization of risk at levels of analysis ranging from

genes to brain to behavior to environment as participants have transitioned from childhood, to adolescence, to early adulthood. Assessment of fathers is another special feature. Publication output to date has included 180 refereed papers and 28 chapters, and has also involved collaboration with numerous non-University of

Michigan investigators who have joined us in using the data to examine their own hypotheses. To enable long term and much broader access, the study has established an agreement to archive all data at the Inter- university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). Non-video data cleaning and curating have

been funded by close-out funds of the long-term MLS R01, aided by a small grant from ICPSR. Complete transfer of the curated database is projected for this July. However, resources are insufficient to digitize and store the 1500 social interactional videotapes involving a) the Eyberg Parent-Child interaction task (carried out

separately with each parent), (b) a standardized marital interaction problem solving task, and (c) a standardized family interaction task. The proposed grant would provide funds to digitize the videotapes, allow the digitized data to be stored at ICPSR, and create the ability for linkage with the remainder of the MLS

archive. Although these social/behavioral data are only a small part of the MLS database, they are unique within the study and also to the field, in permitting analysis of microlevel social interaction (including facial/emotional display characteristics), examining its long term predictive power, and its relationship to the

more traditional but less grounded assessment measures that form the basis for the large majority of social, personality, and behavioral research in the field today.