Combining Methodologies…

Design Process. The proposed study employs humanistic methods of qualitative research analysis, narrative inquiry, and hermeneutic evaluation. The primary objective of the project is to discover parts of a narrative that exposes the children’s view of divorce without pinpointing a single person’s story. The fragments collected from the children during the tabletop gameplay experience will be used to write the script and design a narrative game for the mobile platform. The game narrative for the digital game will be representative of the human experience of divorce. We intend for the tabletop game, and ultimately, the resulting mobile digital game to be persuasive and inspire the parents to make value-based decisions rather than emotional reactions and are interested, subsequently, how these responses affect their co-parenting behavior.

Study Procedures. Parents will come into the lab for a 2-hour research visit. They will complete an informed consent process and pretest assessment (30 min). Parents and children will playtest the tabletop game and sit at a table prepared with the game materials. The children will play with their parents. During the playtesting experience the stories that the children tell as they play the game will be recorded. Parents will then complete a post-test assessment via interview with a research assistant (30 min). Each interview will be confidential and audio-recorded. Parents will be emailed a follow-up assessment delivered via an online survey 4 weeks later. All assessments will be administered using REDCap (Research Electronic Data Capture) is a secure, web-based software platform designed to support data capture for research studies.