The focus of this thesis is on the early caregiving environment and social interactions of preterm infants. Chapter one introduces the topic of premature delivery, including infant outcomes, parent’s caregiving role, infant’s role in their own development, and dyadic interactions between parents and their premature infants. Chapter two introduces methodological difficulties in the study of preterm infants. The chapter also provides an overview of the longitudinal study of preterm infants’ development that provided the majority of the data for this thesis. Chapter three introduces a new measure of parenting principles and practices, the Baby Care Questionnaire (BCQ). The BCQ measures how parents approach caring for their infant in three contexts – sleeping, feeding and soothing. The chapter documents the development and psychometric properties of the BCQ. Chapter four studies the impact of premature birth on maternal cognitions and principles about caregiving. The chapter presents data on the consistency of maternal cognitions about child development and caregiving at an individual and group level. Chapter five studies the impact of premature birth on infant attention, in particular social attention. The chapter reports data on the style of preterm infants’ looking to a novel stimulus, how these infants followed an experimenter’s attention to a target and their regulation abilities (as reported by their mother). Chapter six studies the impact of premature birth on interactions between mothers and their infants. The chapter uses statistical techniques to represent streams of behaviour to examine different responding to person- and object-directed behaviours by mothers and their premature infants. Chapter seven brings together these findings and discusses future work.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:571714 |
| Date | January 2012 |
| Creators | Winstanley, Alice |
| Publisher | Cardiff University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://orca.cf.ac.uk/47366/ |
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