Global BABIES (Babies’ Activities & Behaviors In Everyday Settings) will revolutionize the ecological validity, cultural diversity, global practice, and transparency of developmental science:

(1) We will establish the first global video corpus of everyday activity and behavior in 1000+ mothers and infants in the natural home environment—capturing practices for childrearing, nurturing, and interacting with infants. We will collect 3D renderings of the home environment, indoors and out (including cultural artifacts, technologies, and educational materials). Building on our NIH-funded work across the United States (play-project.org) and partnering with experts at global sites, we will conduct Global BABIES with total transparency and reproducibility, using video as the medium to document everything—including training videos, fidelity to the protocol, and quality assurance. All videos of home visits and supporting materials will be openly shared with researchers worldwide on Databrary, the world’s only large-scale video repository.

(2) We will build “BABIESbrary,” a searchable, expandable library of curated, video clips relevant to infant learning, development, and well-being, including infant-caregiver behavior, everyday activities, and home environments across the globe in a separately branded sector of Databrary. Identification of video clips for BABIESbrary, and decisions about content and search terms will be developed with user communities to ensure cultural relevance.

(3) We will collaboratively build capacity by training local researchers and practitioners on the equitable, open sharing of video for research, teaching, and demonstration. Training will include use of Databrary and BABIESbrary for uploading new material and finding data and video clips for reuse, video recording of behavior and home settings, human video annotation and transcription with Datavyu (an open-source, computerized coding tool), quality assurance and reproducibility, inter-observer reliability, self-curation, and transparent documentation of research protocols.

Our Vision

We will leverage the power of video to galvanize the global science of infant learning and development. Babies’ brains, bodies, and behaviors develop at unprecedented rates, and each change expands opportunities for learning. Infants everywhere acquire foundational skills for moving their bodies, exploring the world, thinking and planning, interacting with others, and forming emotional attachments. And they do so in the context of culturally diverse childrearing practices and everyday settings. However, researchers lack objective, empirical data about cultural variations in childrearing environments—data possible only through video observations of mother-infant behavior in the natural home environments where families live and children develop. In child development, video-based, research on childrearing practices is common, but it is overly reliant on data from the Global North. High-quality video data on childrearing practices in the home setting are critical to understand the unique experiences of infants and mothers from cultures around the world.

Video is the most powerful, widely available, and intuitively accessible medium to document the richness and complexity of behavior and the subtle details of the surrounding context. Large-scale video is amenable to human annotation and machine learning. However, the use of video across global user communities requires the digital infrastructure, ethical policy framework, and training of local personnel to collect, curate, and share video at scale. We will create the first large-scale, global, video corpus of infant-mother everyday activities and behaviors in the home environment—openly shared with researchers worldwide.

Commitment to Open Science

The openly-shared, global video corpus and materials will accelerate research and facilitate discovery by allowing researchers around the globe to reuse data on infant-mother natural activity and behavior in the ecologically-valid, home environment, and to adapt protocols to ask new questions and generate new discoveries. The entire protocol and video examples are shared on this website.