The Development of the Early Child Curiosity Questionnaire

The population group with which one associates curiosity the most is children. To this day, however, only two caregiver reports have been developed to capture variability in children’s curiosity (Piotrowski et al., 2014; Lee et al., 2023). Both are based on specific theoretical frameworks: the interest-deprivation theory (Litman & Jimerson, 2004) and the violation of expectation framework (e.g., Stahl & Feigenson, 2015). Here, we present a novel measure of general curiosity for children between the ages of 2 and 5 years, in which curiosity is captured more broadly where behavioral expressions were not constrained to any specific theoretical framework. The measure is based on the recently created Infant and Toddler Curiosity Questionnaire (ITCQ; Altmann et al., in prep), currently undergoing validation, which is applicable to infants up to 2 years of age. For the novel Early Child Curiosity Questionnaire (EECQ), we adapted and extended the item list to capture how this slightly older age group may explore their environment to learn about it. The new questionnaire consists of 41 items covering various exploratory behaviors such as “My child pokes at and probes objects to see how they feel (e.g., cotton balls, play dough, tree bark, etc.)” and “My child typically seeks clarification for things they do not understand (e.g., how something works)”. Caregivers are asked to consider the last six months and rate each item on a 7-point Likert scale from 1 (‘strongly disagree’) to 7 (‘strongly agree’) as to how well it reflects their child’s typical behavior. The measure is currently being piloted in the UK, Germany and the Netherlands; thus, we aim to present preliminary results of this international collaboration. The measure will be further developed, and its convergent and discriminant validity evaluated, establishing its internal and external validity for capturing individual differences in curiosity. As a result of this work, the newly developed EECQ will help us better understand the crucial developmental concept that is curiosity and enrich the methodological landscape of developmental research