Miriam Carey and Dr. Gawain Wells, Psychology

About a year ago I signed up to be part of the Y-OQ research group. I didn’t really know what the Y-OQ was, I just wanted some research experience. The professor in charge grinned slyly when I asked what I could do to help. He said, “We could really use your help doing data entry.” I heard a few other students chuckle at the sound of his words and I wondered what was so funny. Then a graduate student led me through the rat maze psychology building to a dimly lit room in the basement. He sat me down at an old apple computer and handed me a stack of papers the size of an unabridged dictionary. He showed me how to enter numbers from the paper to the computer and warned me not to make any mistakes or it would really mess up someone’s master’s thesis. Then he left me alone.

I still didn’t know exactly what I was getting into so I thumbed through the stack of papers. They were all labeled Y-OQ. I read the instructions and found that the Y-OQ was a questionnaire that parents filled out about their child’s behavior. They were supposed to compare their child to other children of the same age and rate their child’s behavior in a bunch of different areas. With that in mind I began entering the numbers into the computer.

As I entered one questionnaire after another I began to notice some things that bothered me. First of all, after I entered each questionnaire the computer would spit out a number that was supposed to show whether the kid was messed up or not. Could a number really describe a child’s mental health? The second thing that began to bother me was that the children were of all different ages. In fact I even entered a few four-year-olds. Could children that young really have problems that needed to be dealt with in a psychological questionnaire?

After my experience in the data entry dungeon I had a talk with my professor to answer those questions. I wanted to know more about the Y-OQ and what it was being used for. He gave me a bunch of sources to look up and a doctoral dissertation of one of the graduate students to read. It turned out that the questionnaire had proven itself to be a valid means of testing a child’s behavior. It was cheap and easy to use and had already been adopted by a lot of insurance companies. I also learned that it had only been validated for children ages 6-18. When I talked to the professor again he told me that they had just been assuming that it would also be valid for the four and five-year olds that I had entered.

I couldn’t imagine kids that young would need to have psychological treatment, or if they did, that they could be treated just like the older kids. So I went to the library and looked up research on psychotherapy for preschool children. Most of the research I found said that preschoolers could develop psychological problems and that they could be treated by psychotherapy. Sheila Eyberg, a prominent child psychologist and researcher, said that the needs of preschool children were not being met because there was not enough valid research about the outcomes of psychotherapy for preschoolers. She also mentioned that one of the biggest problem areas in preschool research was the lack of effective measurement tools that were suited for preschoolers.

I decided that if the Y-OQ really was a valid tool for preschool children it could fill this gap and possibly stimulate more research on preschool children. I talked to my professor about testing the Y-OQ for significant differences between preschoolers and older children to find out if we really could assume that it was as valid for that age group. I also applied for the ORCA scholarship so that I could fund the project.

I soon learned that doing your own empirical research was much harder than doing the data entry for someone else’s. First I had to contact a few preschools in the area to see if they would be willing to let me use their students as participants. Then I had to get my project approved by the IRB. I spent the next few days stuffing three hundred envelopes with blank Y-OQs with self- addressed, stamped envelopes and a consent form. At one of the schools I gave the parents the packets at a parent teacher conference and at the other I just had the teachers send home the packets with the kids.

I was a little disappointed when only twenty percent of the parents returned their Y-OQs. My professor said that I could still use my data even though my return rate was so low. So once again I began doing data entry, but this time for my own project. After I had entered all of my data I had one of the computer experts help me with the statistics. My results were way different than my professors or I expected. In fact, they were so far off from my hypothesis that we suspected that I had done something wrong with my data entry. So I reentered all of my data and compared my second results to the first. Sure enough, I continually made the same mistake when I entered the data the first time, so it gave me some very strange statistics. That was when I learned how important it was to audit all of your data.

Once we got that problem figured out I set to work on comparing my two preschools to each other and then comparing all of my data to the older age groups. After about twenty hours of statistical work I came to the conclusion that my two different samples were not different from each other. In general preschoolers have very similar scores to older children, however, I found there were some significant differences between preschoolers and some of the other age groups when the scores were broken down into subscales. Preschoolers tended to have subscale scores that were similar to 6-8 year olds, and 9-11 year olds. Their scores were lower than those of children ages 12-14 and 15-18. This meant that they were significantly less troubled than their teenage counterparts in some areas. This result made sense since some of the items on the Y-OQ dealt with drugs and other issues that preschoolers do not usually have problems with. My results also showed that preschoolers are less depressed than teenagers, perhaps because their lives are not as complex.

My results were an important step in Y-OQ research because they made it apparent that if the Y– OQ was to be used for preschool children we would have to adjust the questionnaire or the scoring manual in order to account for these differences. After I discovered these results I spent many hours writing up my research in a paper that I presented at the Western Psychological Association Convention in Seattle. Although this project was time consuming and frustrating at times, I learned a lot about what it takes to do and publish your research. It was a really good experience.