Grant: Doctoral: Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarships

Needle procedures are common throughout childhood and they often elicit pain and fear in children and parents. Unmanaged pain and fear associated with needles has health implications for the child in pain (e.g., may lead to avoidance of future immunizations) and society more broadly (e.g., may compromise community immunity). Therefore, understanding parents' and children's emotional experience and needs during needle procedures is required to reduce these negative consequences. An in-depth examination of emotions is needed, which involves capturing the individual's own descriptions of the event, and how they behave and respond physiologically to the event. Further, although there are many feasible treatment strategies to manage pain and fear associated with needles, there are no available screening tools to identify parent-child dyads that would likely benefit from such strategies. My doctoral research will address these gaps in the literature by incorporating both quantiative and qualitative information of parent and child emotional experience, including: self-ratings of emotional states, open-ended interview questions, behavioural observation, and physiological activity. This project will also inform the development of a screening tool, which will be evaluated by how well it predicts parent and child reported and observed experiences. A detailed description of how dyads feel before, during, and after the procedure might help us understand what their needs are and which strategies they think would help make needles less upsetting. The use of a simple screening tool can help health care providers identify which parents and children are more likely to need strategies to manage pain and fear. The overall goal of this work is to help make needles a more pleasant experience for families so that they are not avoided in the future.