Understanding predictors of exploratory play in 9- to 11- month-old infants: the impact of maternal education levels, gender, and age

• Main Author: Lon, Serena Hwee Yee
• Other Authors: Setoh Pei Pei
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2023
• Subjects: Social sciences::Psychology::Psychological testing; Social sciences::Psychology::Applied psychology; Social sciences::Psychology::Experimental psychology
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/169649
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This thesis paper explores the predictors of exploratory play in nine to eleven months old infants using a subsample of participating families obtained from the BE POSITIVE study (Beginning Early: SingaPore’s Ongoing Study starting in Infancy of Twenty-first-century-skills, Individual differences, and Variance in the Environment). In this study, we obtained the video recordings and questionnaires from a subsample of participating families (n = 50) to address research questions pertaining to infants’ exploratory play. The relationship of maternal educational levels, infants’ gender and ages in relation to their exploration tendencies were explored in detail. Maternal educational levels was found to have moderate effect on infants’ duration of exploration whereby infants of mothers with higher educational levels explored longer compared to infants of mothers with lower educational levels. Gender differences in terms of duration of exploration was identified. Female infants spent a longer period of time exploring than male infants.