Your voice is needed! BABYWEARING RESEARCH SURVEY IS LAUNCHED!
Apr 02, 2022
I was recently asked, "Why are you researching the language of babywearing, and what is the point of creating a dictionary?" The more we can understand about the language we use to encourage caregivers to utilize babywearing as a part of their toolkit, the better we will be able to serve a broader population.
Over the last two years, UBC & I (CBWS) have been steadily working toward a research project, "Wear All the Babies": Learning and Sharing the Language of Babywearing," that would get funding – not as clear cut or swift as I imagined! Lol –duh, I know. We've held a few events to expand our understanding and have a reference for the current language, terms, and hashtags used in the babywearing community.
We held an online virtual event in November 2020: "Building Community through Babywearing Research: What is the language of babywearing?"
We held an online presentation in September 2021: Babywearing & Social Media: "Who's posting, where are they posting, and what are they saying?"
Now, we are taking the first step in our "Wear All the Babies": Learning and Sharing the Language of Babywearing" research project. The first step is the online survey to collect our shared language and terms. Your voice is what makes the magic! I invite you to participate!
In the coming months, we will reach out to our graduates, and others, to dig deeper into how our lingo impacts our roles in babywearing education and consultation.
Adding your voice to the collective will help all people who work with babywearing education to make the education and promotion more universal and open up more opportunities - so more people can become aware and adopt the practice of babywearing.
The dictionary will be published and freely available online when we complete our research.
CBWS will use the dictionary in all our babywearing training courses to reduce the barrier of entry. The goal is that more people will be able to quickly get up to speed with the lingo related to our industry - try as we may to reduce lingo, plenty will always remain.
Christine Schreyer, and the team of researchers from UBC, continue to help me understand research protocols. Such as, it's common to get rejected and need to tweak your grant proposal. We needed to adapt our scope of research for this project, but in the end, we got a yes! That's a win, and when we complete this research, we will write a proposal to expand the dictionary's scope, which is extremely exciting!
