Assessing Day-to-Day Emotion Dynamics Within the Whole Family: Protocol for a Family-Wide Ecological Momentary Assessment Study (The Family and Child Emotion Study).

Abstract

Background: Families play a pivotal role in shaping children's emotional development through emotion socialization. However, most research has focused on individual or dyadic relationships, such as those between parents and children, overlooking the more complex dynamics that emerge when multiple family members interact simultaneously. This limited perspective fails to capture the full scope of the interconnected emotional processes within family units. A contributing factor to this gap is the limited availability of models suited for capturing and analyzing complex, family-level data.

Objective: The Family and Child Emotion Study aims to address this gap by examining family-wide emotion dynamics across all family members-including parents and children-as they naturally unfold in daily life.

Methods: This protocol uses a pre-post design and a 7-day ecological momentary assessment period combined with ambulatory monitoring of heart rate and electrodermal activity within whole family units to examine interactions among mothers, fathers, and siblings, providing a comprehensive understanding of family-wide emotion processes. Data will be analyzed using a network analytical approach, specifically multilevel vector autoregressive modeling, to investigate dynamic emotional processes within and between family members.

Results: Funding was received in April 2020. Data collection began in September 2022 and will continue until March 2026. As of May 2025, the Family and Child Emotion Study has collected data from 48 eligible families. Data analyses will begin after March 2026, with results expected to be published in Fall 2027.

Conclusions: This study introduces an innovative approach for examining emotion dynamics within whole-family systems in naturalistic settings, offering practical guidance for collecting and analyzing complex, multilevel, and nested data. The primary aim is to investigate how family emotion networks contribute to children's emotional functioning and development. A secondary aim is to explore key factors, such as parental psychological functioning and child emotion regulation abilities, that may shape these networks. This protocol serves as a valuable framework for future researchers exploring family-wide emotion dynamics.

International registered report identifier (irrid): DERR1-10.2196/77364.