Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Research Protocols
Date Submitted: May 13, 2025
Date Accepted: Aug 25, 2025
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
The Family and Child Emotion Study: Protocol for Measuring and Analyzing Day-to-Day Emotion Dynamics Within Whole Family Units
ABSTRACT
Background:
Families play a pivotal role in shaping children's emotional development through emotion socialization. However, most research has focused on individual or dyadic relationships, such as those between parents and children, overlooking the more complex dynamics that emerge when multiple family members interact simultaneously. This limited perspective fails to capture the full scope of the interconnected emotional processes within family units. A contributing factor to this gap is the limited availability of models suited for capturing and analyzing complex, family-level data.
Objective:
The Family and Child Emotion Study aims to address this gap by examining family-wide emotion dynamics as they naturally unfold in daily life. This protocol seeks to capture how emotions are experienced, expressed, and regulated across all family members—including parents and children—within their everyday environments.
Methods:
This protocol utilizes a pre-post design and a seven-day ecological momentary assessment period combined with ambulatory monitoring of heart rate and electrodermal activity within whole family units to examine interactions among mothers, fathers, and siblings, providing a comprehensive understanding of family-wide emotion processes. Data will be analyzed using a network analytical approach, specifically multilevel vector autoregressive modeling, to investigate dynamic emotional processes within and between family members. Discussion: This study introduces an innovative approach for examining emotion dynamics within whole-family systems in naturalistic settings, offering practical guidance for collecting and analyzing complex, multilevel, and nested data. The primary aim is to investigate how family emotion networks contribute to children’s emotional functioning and development. A secondary aim is to explore key factors, such as parental psychological functioning and child emotion regulation abilities, that may shape these networks. This protocol serves as a valuable framework for future researchers exploring family-wide emotion dynamics.
Citation
