The ChiParNet project has made significant progress toward its objective of advancing our understanding of mutual intergenerational boundary-making in children's and parents' networks through three successive steps.
The first step is to develop a theory of how children and parents affect each other's networks. Theory development continued throughout the first two years of the project, and the PI presented the theory at respective stages at several conferences and scientific meetings.
The second step is to collect panel data on children's and parents' networks, which, in the final third step, can be used to test the theory. Since no data meet all necessary criteria, the project collects three waves of innovative, unique panel data on children's and parents' networks across multiple starting cohorts from early childhood to adolescence, in educational settings (i.e. kindergartens and schools) with varying levels of ethnic and cultural diversity.
A first milestone for the second step was to conduct a pilot study at a high-diversity elementary school with 2nd-grade children and their parents. We selected a high-diversity school with 2nd graders, expecting them to be the most difficult group to collect data from, given their young age (about 7) and potential language barriers. The pilot study also constituted the first attempt to collect network data from both children and their parents.
We conducted the pilot study on site on October 8, 2025. Overall, the two questionnaires we developed for children and parents worked well, allowing us to identify potential problems and thus improve them for the main data collection. Children completed questionnaires in class, using tablets and headphones provided by the project team to listen to the questions. Parents obtained a QR code that allowed them to answer the survey online.
A second milestone for the data collection was the recruitment of the target sample of schools, including different starting cohorts (grade 2, 5, and 7) and varying levels of ethnic diversity (low, medium, and high). We successfully did so during autumn 2025. As planned in the Description of the Action, we recruited nine elementary schools (starting cohort grade 2) as well as ten secondary schools (starting cohorts grades 5 and 7). For both types of school, we recruited three low-, medium-, and high-diversity schools each.
The third milestone was the start of the first wave of the data collection, which began in February 2026. For reasons explained in section 2.4 as well as the need to coordinate data collection with the school's schedules, this was several months after the original timeline described in the Description of the Action. At the end of February, we had collected data in six schools. Data collections with ten other schools are scheduled for March and April 2026. (As described in section 2.1 below, we had to cancel data collection in three schools.) All participating schools agreed to collect the second and third waves in early 2027 and 2028, respectively.
The third step will be to test the theory empirically using the collected panel data. As explained in the Description of the Action, this requires panel data, which we will have in mid 2027. We will begin preliminary and descriptive data analysis after completing fieldwork for the first wave.
