A contextual approach to characterising caregiver responsiveness in a rural area of The Gambia

Interactions with caregivers play a crucial role in early neurocognitive development. While most of the world’s children live in Majority World countries, research on caregiving predominantly uses measures developed in the Minority World (particularly North America and Europe), potentially biasing characterisations of parenting in understudied populations. This study describes the development of the “Demba Yaal Interaction Scale (DYIS)”, a behavioural micro-coding scheme to assesses caregiver responsiveness in a rural, low-resource, collectivist caregiving community in The Gambia. We adopted a contextually sensitive approach by co-creating the scheme partnering Gambian researchers, familiar with the caregiving context, and UK researchers familiar with behavioural coding. The scheme was piloted on 5-minute videorecorded mother-infant interactions, when infants were aged 12-months (N=50, 48% female). There were substantial individual differences in maternal responsiveness levels. Modality-wise, responses were most likely to be non-verbal, compared to verbal or bimodal. Mothers with some formal education were significantly more responsive and more readily engaged in bimodal responsiveness. Negative associations between these interactive behaviours and maternal demographic and socioeconomic variables (age, number of children, household size) were present, but did not remain significant after correction for multiple comparisons. Moreover, associations emerged between infant physical growth and infant behaviours, as well as between maternal responsiveness and infant communication, although these too, did not remain significant after correction for multiple comparison. Our work provides a potential framework for future research seeking to develop contextually tailored assessments of caregiving practices and highlights important demographic and health variables that warrant further examination in larger samples.