Understanding the development of social behavior & behavioral control in twins
Most children develop well and find their way into society without many problems, but not all children manage to do so.
What is the role of brain development in child development? How are children’s chances for thriving determined by their parents? How we can better guide children’s development? That's what we want to find out.
What are the building blocks of the developing brain?
How do environmental and genetic factors interact in children & adolescents?
Our research questions
Which optimal conditions add to well-being in childhood and beyond?
Are there sensitive windows for social development?
What we study
We measure many factors in a child’s life
We assess the cognitive, emotional and social processes of children that are important for social competence and behavioral control. These include social behavior and behavioral control, social competence, parenting, neurobiology, environment, differential susceptibility and family background factors.
With a variety of methods and outcomes
Complex and dynamic processes can be best understood using a multi-informant and multi-method approach. We measure many factors in a child’s life, in a variety of ways using different methods on social, environmental and physiological outcomes.
In a longitudinal twin design
We run a unique longitudinal design to map within-subject change that enables us to assess individual development. The participants are monozygotic and dizygotic same sex twin pairs and their parents. The study setup includes two age cohorts that will allow us to assess 10 years of development and additionally allow for replication.
We want to improve young people’s well-being and learn which conditions are optimal for social development.
In the Leiden-CID study, more than a hundred measures were used over the course of two cohorts in a total of six data collection waves. For each measurement, we have a data file and metadata information. Want to explore what we collected?
We have learned a lot about collecting data in children and adolescence. Therefore, we share our protocols, best practices, data and lessons learned. We were able to keep 80% of our participants on board after 6 years of annual assessment, and want to share our experiences.
Coming soon: full data access
In the future, we will share data, with respect to the privacy of our participant. This will not only reduce financial resources and herewith scarce scientific resources, but even more importantly will reduce participant burden. To ensure ethical and responsible use of this data, learn about the steps for requesting access. COMING SOON!
Learn from our work
We want to share our research practices and lessons learned to increase scientific quality, and facilitate reproducibility and replicability. In addition, we aim to bolster the value of the costly and time-consuming data collection by sharing everything we learned.
We believe that open science is important in improving science quality. Therefore, we make our protocols accessible to other researchers.
A study & team with ambitions
Founded in 2013
The Leiden-CID study was founded by Marinus van IJzendoorn, Eveline Crone, Marian Bakermans-Kranenburg and Rutger Engels in 2013. The study was developed as one of four work packages of the overarching Consortium on Individual Development (CID).
Our aim and study design
The aim of the Leiden-CID was to increase our understanding of the developmental pathways of social behavior and behavioral control important to social competence in developing individuals. In addition, the study aims to understand sensitive windows in the development of these behaviors through differential susceptibility effects of social enrichment.
It takes a village to raise a child, but also to collect data on 1000 children and their families. About 200 researchers and students helped during the data collection of the Leiden-CID project. And we are very proud that, five PhD candidates have successfully defended their thesis on the Leiden-CID Project.
Collecting data in children and adolescents comes with unique challenges, and not all measures that are designed for adults work well with children. Furthermore, keeping children engaged and focused throughout the data collection session is of great importance for the data quality. We have learned a lot about collecting data in children and adolescence, and share our experiences on this website. The project has resulted in many publications.
