3/5 HEAL Consortium: Establishing Innovative Approaches for the HEALthy Brain and Child Development Study

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the mental and physical health of children and their parents. Thepandemic has also affected the ability to conduct in-person research at most institutions across the UnitedStates. However, recent technological advances may allow many in-person assessments to transition to virtualformats. There is an urgent need to develop virtual versions of currently used assessments of the homeenvironment and parent-child interactions, and to concurrently study the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic onfamily relationships. The proposed project seeks to address this urgent need by building upon ongoingresearch efforts among three sites from the NIH HEALthy Brains and Cognitive Development (HBCD) study:Arkansas Children's Research Institute, Cincinnati Children's Hospital, and the University of North Carolina atChapel Hill. We will develop and test a virtual version of the HOME Inventory in 90 caregivers with infantsbetween 6-18 months of age. We will validate this virtual version by performing in-person HOME Inventoryassessments in 45 of these dyads. In all participants, we will use a standard questionnaire to assess COVID-19 exposure and impact. Finally, we will examine associations between regional and temporal variations inCOVID-19 exposure and impact and dimensions of the HOME Inventory. The results of this study will be usedto finalize the development of a virtual HOME Inventory protocol that can be widely used in future studies,including the HBCD Phase II study.