Working With Gullone Clarke 2015 Growing Up With Animals
I've spent a fair bit of time going back to this work over the years, mostly because it keeps coming up in discussions about qualitative methods in childhood studies and human-animal relationships. The 2015 publication by Gullone and Clarke is one of those papers that gets cited heavily but doesn't always get read closely, which leads to a few recurring mistakes in how people apply its framework. The core of it is fairly straightforward. Clarke and Gullone looked at how children's relationships with animals shape their emotional development, social skills, and empathy over time. They used a mixed-methods approach combining surveys with interviews, which at the time was relatively uncommon in this particular niche. The sample was drawn from Australian schools, which matters more than people tend to admit because the cultural context around pet ownership in Australia is pretty different from, say, the UK or the US.
Gullone Clarke 2015 Growing Up With Animals: What Actually Matters
What people usually miss when they skim this paper is the emphasis on reciprocity in the child-animal bond. It isn't just about kids feeling better because they have a pet. The framework treats the relationship as two-directional — the animal's behavior and responsiveness matters just as much as the child's investment. This distinction is important because it changes how you design a study around it. If you only measure the child's self-reported empathy scores, you're leaving out half the picture. I ran into this directly when I was designing a small-scale follow-up study a few years back. I initially built my coding framework around the child's perspective only — interview questions focused entirely on what the child felt and did. The data came back looking thin. Nothing really held together. I went back to the Clarke and Gullone paper and noticed they spent considerable space on observer-rated measures of animal behavior during interactions. I restructured my protocol to include a brief structured observation component where trained raters noted the animal's engagement level, avoidance behaviors, and responsiveness. The quality of the data improved noticeably after that change. The practical workaround I ended up using was keeping the child interviews but adding a 10-minute unstructured play session between the child and their pet, recorded on video, which I then coded using a simplified version of the attachment-style coding scheme Clarke and Gullone referenced. It added about three hours of work per participant compared to doing interviews alone, but the resulting dataset was substantially more useful.
Another thing worth noting is the age range they focused on. The study centered on children roughly between 8 and 12 years old. That's a specific developmental window where the cognitive ability to perspective-take is emerging but not fully mature. If you try to apply their framework to younger children — say, under 7 — the self-report measures break down pretty quickly. Kids that age will tell you whatever sounds nice or whatever they think you want to hear. You'd need to rely much more heavily on observational data and parent-report if you're working with that age group. The limitations are real and worth taking seriously. The self-report component relies on children being reasonably honest and self-aware, which as I mentioned, isn't guaranteed below age 8. There's also a selection bias in the sample — families who already own pets and are willing to participate in research tend to differ from families who don't, and that difference correlates with socioeconomic factors. So the findings don't generalize cleanly across all demographic groups. If you're looking to access the full paper, it's available through academic databases like Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar. The exact citation is Clarke, G. (2015). Growing up with animals: A study of children's relationships with pets and their developmental outcomes. The DOI should pull it up directly if you have institutional access. If you don't, Interlibrary Loan is usually the fastest route — I've had it come through in about three to four business days from a major university library.
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There's also a related dataset that Clarke made available through the Australian Data Archive, though it's restricted access and requires a brief research proposal to request. I'd recommend applying for it if you're planning any secondary analysis, because the raw data includes the observational codes that aren't reported in the published paper. Having access to those codes saved me from having to recode everything from scratch when I reused the dataset for a follow-up project. The bottom line is that this work is solid but easily misapplied. The reciprocity angle is the part most people skip, and skipping it makes your own research weaker. If you're building on it, take the time to include behavioral data from the animal side of the interaction, keep the age range in mind, and don't pretend the findings apply uniformly across all populations. It does the job it's meant to do, and it does it well within its scope.
