Some of the first empirical studies of child development involved collecting in vivo data to measure the affiliations of preschool children (Goodenough & Anderson, 1931). Little has changed in the intervening years. Expert observations remain the gold standard, underpinning the validity of child and teacher reports.

It is easy to understand why scholars value expert observations of affiliation: They are both accurate and descriptive. New technologies are available that build on these advantages, providing continuous, simultaneous data on all children in a classroom. The goal of the present study is to validate a new procedure for assessing peer affiliation, one that integrates data obtained from continuous movement tracking (Ubisense: Killijian, Pasqua, Roy, Trédan, & Zanon, 2016) and continuous vocalization recordings (LENA: Sangwan, Hansen, Irvin, Crutchfield, & Greenwood, 2015). We illustrate with data from an inclusive oral language preschool classroom for children with and without hearing loss.  Read more . . . (.pdf)