Progress Report
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Child Care Commons 2.0 : Building Children's Social Capital and Creating Social Value for Co-Nurturing[2] Understanding the benefits of social capital
Progress until FY2025
1. Outline of the project
In this research and development project, we will work toward the social implementation of the “Child Care Commons (CCC)” by building a developmental data infrastructure and creating an evidence book that organizes the benefits and effectiveness of CCC.
Task 21: Building a Large-Scale Child Development Research Infrastructure and Evaluating Parent–Child Interaction
Large-scale longitudinal studies are essential for clarifying how social capital relates to child development. In this task, we will establish the necessary research infrastructure and develop new indicators for evaluating parent–child interactions.
Task 22: Understanding the Benefits of CCC 2.0
This task aims to understand the effects of initiatives such as CCC, as well as individual differences in those effects. Based on empirical evidence, we will clarify what kinds of benefits participation in CCC provides and for whom those benefits are most effective.
2. Outcome so far
Task 21: Building a Large-Scale Child Development Research Infrastructure and Evaluating Parent–Child Interaction
We completed the development of specific operational procedures and guidelines for a system designed to support longitudinal research using a distributed Personal Data Store (PDS) architecture (Yazawa et al., 2021, BDCC).
In this data infrastructure, both researchers and participants possess their own independent PDSs. Research data are stored in each PDS through the system, and participants can choose to share their data with other researchers when needed. This enables the integration of data from the same individual across geographically separated research institutions.
The true potential of this infrastructure emerges as more data become available online, making it easier for multiple research institutions to accumulate and combine participant data. To this end, we have been examining the validity of conducting assessments such as eye-tracking and language development tests online. In addition, we have been developing methods to capture constructs such as interpersonal closeness, which have traditionally been difficult to assess objectively (see the figure below).
Ethical approval has been obtained from multiple universities, including The University of Tokyo, and online data collection has already begun for part of the dataset.
Task 22: Understanding the Benefits of CCC 2.0
Approximately 4,000 individuals ranging in age from 4 to 85 years participated in a survey asking whether they had trustworthy non-parental figures during childhood (for participants aged 18 and older, this referred to recollections of experiences before age 18). The findings revealed a polarized distribution: some individuals reported having very few people they could rely on when in trouble (blue), whereas others reported having many such people (pink) (see the figure below).
We also aim to predict these psychological and behavioral characteristics from objective indicators such as brain-related measures. However, conventional approaches have required cooperation from extremely large numbers of participants, which has posed a major challenge. We proposed a method that enables stable prediction even from relatively small samples, achieving a 50% improvement in predictive accuracy (Feng et al., in press).
Furthermore, recognizing that social connectedness does not necessarily contribute equally to well-being for everyone—and that the optimal level of connectedness may differ across individuals—we found that personality traits moderate this relationship (manuscript in preparation).
3. Future plans
Going forward, we will clarify what kinds of social capital are needed for different individuals. Based on these findings, we aim to propose forms of social connectedness that are optimal for each individual and to examine whether such connections can be fostered through CCC, as well as whether building these connections contributes to improvements in well-being.