On the Importance of Representation in Research

By Rachel Burstein, PhD

Young children in the Dallas neighborhood where UTD junior Aurora Rochin grew up didn’t always have access to high-quality early childhood education. Rochin remembers that while some children in her predominately low-income and Spanish-speaking community attended community programs, “a lot of kids stayed home and watched TV all day, or didn’t have a lot of access to books or toys.” 

It was largely the opportunity to serve children and families like the ones that she grew up with that drove Rochin to apply for the Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) internship program at UTD’s Center for Children and Families (CCF). The National Science Foundation-supported program provides 12 undergraduates from historically underrepresented groups with a paid opportunity to build expertise as early learning researchers while contributing to the CCF’s community-based outreach programs.

Rochin recalls, “The challenges that a lot of the families [served by CCF] face, not just parents, but the kids as well, and the kind of environment that they might be growing up in, that was something that motivated me to work with that population” at the CCF’s flagship community outreach program, Play with Me (Juega Conmigo). 

Modeling Behaviors to Encourage Early Learning

Designed for children 0-3 years old and their caretakers, the Play With Me program offers bilingual instruction on games and activities to support little learners through play. REU Fellows assist the Play with Me program manager in implementing sessions, and are taking turns facilitating conversations with the children’s caretakers. At the same time, they’re making observations about the children’s development that will contribute to their overall knowledge and research projects in the spring semester.

For Enrico Young, an REU Fellow who is a junior at UTD, the experience has been eye-opening. “I think we’ve developed the mothers’ trust now. And we’ve definitely developed a bond with the kids. I think that just getting that experience upfront of working with the families and observing [has been incredible] because just from the weeks that we’ve worked, we’ve seen the kids develop new skills.” 

REU Fellow Rodrigo Bezanilla Davila, a former community college student who is now a junior, feels similarly.  Bezanilla Davila works with a four-month old baby who attends the Play with Me program with his mother and two-year old sibling. Bezanilla Davila describes the experience of observing the baby’s development as “eye-opening.” 

“[At first the child] is a little vulnerable, before he could roll. Two weeks later he can roll both ways,” Bezanilla Davila says. “All those critical periods in growth and development and language acquisition, those aspects are truly amplified” among the age range served by the Play with Me program. 

REU Fellows have also been learning how to lead Play with Me sessions. Bezanilla Davila recalls, “[The leader of the Play with Me program] told us, ‘I’m going to help you all do this, but at the end of the day, this program will be yours. You’ll be running it. I’ll just be here to assist.’”

At the same time, Bezanilla Davila and his peers emphasize that their role is to facilitate learning and conversation, not to dictate what caregivers should be doing with their children. Rochin—who is not a parent herself—says, “​​I think sometimes, I feel a little nervous offering my advice and input, just because I know that the parents are more likely to be more experienced and to already have been having these experience with their kids…But I’ve also started to recognize that that’s not quite the goal.”

Instead, Rochin explains that her job is to model behaviors and interactions that respond to children’s developmental needs. For example, Rochin has observed that parents sometimes ask their young children to sit silently and focus on a speaker because they believe that it’s rude to do otherwise. 

Rochin says, “One thing that we model to parents [in the Play with Me program] is that even as we’re speaking and having a conversation with them, it is okay for their kids to start running around or to just start playing with toys.” Rochin describes such examples as “the kinds of parenting behaviors that I can see from my own childhood” in a Latinx household. 

Bringing a Culturally Sensitive Perspective

Rochin is grateful for the opportunity to bring the twin lenses of personal experience and researcher to her work with families in the Play with Me program. She feels that her perspective is one that has been sorely lacking within early childhood development research.

The field is beginning to take notice of this problem. In 2015, the Society for Research in Child Development, the primary professional organization for the field, elevated diversity in both research topics and in researcher identity as an explicit goal in its strategic plan. The issue is particularly acute in communities like Dallas because the research on early childhood development does not always reflect the realities of a local population that is heavily Hispanic with over two-in-five people speaking a language other than English at home.

The problem of lack of diversity among researchers and in research subjects is not unique to early childhood development research. A recent study from researchers from Stanford University found that research published in prominent psychology journals seldom addressed race. When examinations of race did appear, they were likely to be written by white authors. Only 5 percent of examined journals between 1974 and 2018 featured editors-in-chief who were definitely people of color, while over 80 percent were definitely white.

That breakdown has profound implications for the topics studied and conclusions drawn in early childhood development research—implications that the REU program is taking head on. Rochin says, “[In the REU program] We [see] a lot of psychological research and concepts tend to have an ethnocentric view, where we view psychology through the lens of white middle-class Americans. But [the program is] it’s a lot more than that.”,” Rochin says. 

She offers an example of how the REU program presents opportunities for a more “culturally sensitive perspective” to early childhood development research and interventions. “In Latino culture, there is an aspect of listening to your elders, and acting a certain way so that you can look a certain way for the community. So we can’t just go in and start saying, ‘Based on these findings and research, you shouldn’t do that.’” 

Instead, Rochin believes that it’s important to model positive behaviors and empower parents—topics that have been frequently discussed in weekly REU seminars with UTD faculty members of different disciplines.

Empowering parents requires honoring their experience, Young argues. In a recent seminar, REU Fellows discussed literature about the importance of reading books to young children. “But most of us [in the program] were not read to as babies or toddlers. But our mothers did talk to us a lot, and used songs to deliver the language skills we needed to develop,” Young says. “So even though we [didn’t have access to] books, we somehow figured out a way to make it work.” 

Giselle Reyes, an REU Fellow and UTD neuroscience student agrees. Reyes is interested in the language acquisition process for young children. But when she consulted the academic literature about this process, she discovered that research centered primarily on children who spoke one language. Missing was the experience of children like many of those in the Play with Me program—and of Reyes herself: children who spoke Spanish as a first language and who acquired English as an additional language. 

Reyes argues that it’s important to have researchers from underrepresented groups in the early childhood development field because they’re asking a different set of questions—research questions that impact a huge number of children who have largely been left out of the literature. She says, “Having this program sets the standard that inclusivity is important on a small scale, but on a large, global scale as well.” 

Looking to the Future

The REU program is having impacts in other ways as well. Rochin reports that the program has crystallized her career goals. “[Before the program] I kind of had the idea [that] I wanted to go into community work, and I want to do some research,” Rochin says. “But I didn’t really know what steps I could take to get there….[Now] I can more easily see how the research translates into the active work, the application.”

Similarly, Young knew that he wanted to go into medicine before entering the REU program. But now he has decided to go into family medicine for underserved communities. “The whole idea of giving back to people really [resonated] with me a lot this semester,” Young says. 

For Bezanilla Davila, the REU program is providing a space to learn from people from different disciplines, especially psychology. He says, “Even though my ultimate goal is to become a surgeon, I think that’s really important for me to [understand the] psychology aspect.” And for all of the students, the program offered far more than academic learning. As Young put it, “There is an exciting place for us to learn not just the science part of [early childhood development], but how to see ourselves as scientists.”

Rachel Burstein, PhD, is an independent education researcher and writer. Her writing has appeared in EdSurge, Slate, the Stanford Social Innovation Review, and TIME, among other publications. Reach her at rachel [at] bursteinresearch [dot] com.