CHRAT Vacation Studentship – Summer 2013
Student: Adele Wang
Supervisor(s): Professor David Skuse and Professor Steven Hailes (UCL Computer Sciences Department)
Title of Project: GPS tracking of children’s social behaviour in real-life environments
Aim of Project: To develop an innovative way of monitoring social behaviour using GPS technology.
Brief description of project and results. Please also comment on the value of your experience:
Social behaviour, especially in childhood, provides important indications and predictors, for example, of
personality types and mental illnesses. Traditionally, the study of social behaviour in children uses rather
subjective methodologies. The most common form of data collection within this field is the use of observational
techniques whereby the investigator uses a sampling method and a predetermined coding strategy. My project at
the Behavioural and Brain Sciences Unit, ICH, investigated the use of a novel method to report social behaviour. By
using GPS monitors to track the movement of children in the playground during free play, it was hoped that the
technique could enable social behaviour to be monitored in a quantitative and more objective way. This idea of
using GPS monitors stemmed from the studies using the devices on other animals, such as on sheep to study
flocking behaviour. GPS data had previously been collected in a boys’ school last summer and there were findings
of strong correlations between observed behaviour and the GPS data.
An area of interest in this study was to try and
identify sex differences between boys and girls aged 911. My project involved liaising with the UCL
Department of Computer Sciences and observing the
development of the GPS monitors. Once the monitors
were made, I went to a girls’ preparatory school and
collected data over a period of 2 months in order to
obtain repeated measures of the same girl, to ensure
reliability – GPS monitors were fixed to caps which
were given to the girls during break and lunch times,
and the monitors recorded 15 minute sessions of free
play. Following data collection, I was involved in the
extraction and analysis of data, which involved
changing the raw longitudinal and latitudinal
coordinates into x-y coordinates relative to an assigned
position for ease of analysis and comparison, and also
Girls in the playground, faint red lines are ‘heat lines’
generating trajectory and time matrices, as well as map
indicating where girls had been most recently
views of the children’s movements, using Matlab
programming. From the map views, it was immediately possible to identify sex differences, for example, in the
group clusterings – the boys tended to aggregate in smaller groups than girls, while the girls formed larger social
networks though also forming smaller subgroups consisting of 2-3 girls.
This was an innovative investigation and paves the way for further research in this area. To explore the
data collected more precisely, the UCL Computer Sciences Department are currently developing an algorithm from
the GPS data which hopes to predict social behaviour for that particular test group. Further methods of validation
of this GPS methodology are also being considered such as the use of ‘sociometry’ questionnaires which gather self
and peer rated information to establish friendship patterns, personality types and how each girl is viewed by her
peers.
As well as this main project, I have also had an opportunity to fully immerse myself into the research being
done at BBSU. I have also been involved in projects such as looking into the new DSM-5 criteria for the new
diagnosis of Social Communication (Pragmatics) Disorder and also looking into the validity of the Developmental,
Diagnostic and Dimensional Interview (3di) for assessing autism in preschool children. Furthermore, I had the
opportunity to observe clinical autism assessments in the GOSH SCD clinic.
Through my GPS project as well as my other projects, I have developed my skills in gathering data in
human studies, communications and liaising with other deparments, manipulating and analysing large extensive
datasets on SPSS, different areas of statistical analysis and in Matlab. I had an immensely enjoyable experience
being part of the BBSU team, an experience which has made me even more confident of my choice to pursue a
career in research within psychology. I wish to thank Professor Skuse, Sarah Osborne and everyone else at BBSU
as well as the UCL Computer Sciences Department who made my 6 months at ICH (2 months CHRAT summer
placement plus 4 months extended internship) a very memorable one indeed.