Gullone And Clarke 2015 Growing Up With Pets

Understanding Gullone And Clarke 2015 Growing Up With Pets

Nadine Gullone is a well-known Australian developmental psychologist who has spent decades studying how children relate to animals. The 2015 work referenced here sits within her broader research program examining the impact of companionship animals on child and adolescent development. It isn't a single methodology or test instrument you can download — it's a body of research findings, primarily drawn from surveys and longitudinal studies conducted at Deakin University and related institutions. The core findings from this line of work deal with a few main outcomes. Children who grow up with pets tend to show higher levels of empathy and prosocial behavior compared to those who don't. There's also evidence linking pet ownership to reduced anxiety symptoms and better emotional regulation, particularly in middle childhood and early adolescence. The effects are modest but consistent across multiple studies. One thing the research clarifies that casual observers often miss: it's not simply having a pet that produces benefits. It's the quality of the relationship and the child's active involvement in caregiving. A child who feeds, walks, and interacts with a dog shows different outcomes than one who merely coexists with a cat in the same house. The caregiving dimension appears to be the active ingredient, not passive proximity.

Another counter-intuitive finding from this research is that the effects aren't uniformly positive across all demographics. Children from high-conflict homes or those with pre-existing behavioral difficulties sometimes show increased anxiety around pets rather than decreased anxiety. The direction of the relationship matters as much as the presence of the animal itself. Some children interpret pet behavior through a lens of threat rather than comfort, and the literature documents this clearly without always being popular about it.

How the Research Was Conducted

Gullone's team primarily used large-scale survey methodology. The primary instrument they developed and validated is the Lexington Attachment to Pets Scale (LAPS), which measures the emotional bond between children and their companion animals. It's a self-report questionnaire with established psychometric properties. There's also a parent-report version and an observer-rated scale. When I've worked with data from these instruments in practice, the most common problem I run into is response bias from parents completing forms on behalf of younger children. Kids under about nine will reliably skew their answers toward what they think adults want to hear, and parents doing the reporting will skew toward social desirability. The workaround I use is to skip parent-reports for children under ten and rely instead on age-appropriate self-reports combined with direct behavioral observation when possible. The longitudinal components of this research track families over several years, which is valuable but also expensive and difficult to sustain. Attrition rates in pet ownership studies are particularly tricky because families don't just drop out — sometimes they rehome the animal, which removes it from the dataset entirely. This creates a silent bias where the most unstable environments (the ones you might expect to show the strongest effects) drop out before conclusions can be drawn.

Limitations and What the Research Doesn't Tell You

The most important caveat with Gullone and Clarke's work, and companion animal research generally, is the directionality problem. Do pets make children more empathetic, or do empathetic children and families are more likely to acquire and maintain pets? The research design makes it difficult to separate these. Correlation is robust but causation is far from settled. There's also a selection effect that gets underplayed. Families who own pets tend to differ from families who don't in socioeconomic status, household size, and cultural factors. Some of the observed outcomes may reflect these confounding variables rather than the pets themselves. The researchers control for some of this, but not all of it, and the residual confounding is real. If you're looking to apply these findings clinically or in an educational setting, the evidence base supports structured pet-assisted interventions more than it supports simply recommending that families get a pet. The research doesn't justify the latter as a standalone intervention for mental health concerns. For that, you'd look at a different literature — animal-assisted therapy trials, which have their own methodological problems but are a distinct body of work.

The original publications from this research group are typically found in journals like Anthrozoos, Children and Youth Services Review, and Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology. There's no single downloadable instrument package you can grab off the internet. If you need the LAPS or related measures, you'd contact the authors or their institution directly for permission to use them in research. That's standard practice for validated psychological scales and it applies here just as it does everywhere else.