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C.1 SELECTION OF CHILD AND FAMILY MEASURES
Our approach to selecting child and family measures was based on several guiding principles:
- Relevance to Intervention Goals and Key Hypotheses. The
measures we chose were concentrated in areas that are important
for children and families, that the Early Head Start program seeks
to influence, and for which we had strong hypotheses about the short-term
effects of the program.
- Appropriateness to Children's Age and Developmental Level.
Because developmental change is rapid during the early years that
are the focus of the evaluation, the measures of child outcomes
appropriate at this age tend to focus on relatively narrow age ranges.
Thus, to measure a particular outcome at different ages, we often
had to select different outcome measures. In addition, a relatively
large proportion of children from economically disadvantaged families
exhibit developmental lags. Therefore, we considered the developmental
level, as well as the chronological age of the children when choosing
measures.
- Appropriateness for the Early Head Start Population. Many
of the families in the sample have low income and represent racial,
ethnic, and linguistic minority groups. Therefore, our goal was
to choose measures available in languages other than English and
normed or used with samples that include a variety of ethnic groups
and children from economically disadvantaged families. In addition,
we chose measures used with parents to be appropriate to their expected
reading and comprehension levels as well as their cultural backgrounds.
- Adequate Psychometric Properties. We chose measures with
adequate reliability and validity for children from low-income families
and for a number of racial and ethnic groups. In general we chose
measures with a demonstrated internal consistency reliability (coefficient
alpha) of .70 or higher (this level is generally accepted as an
adequate demonstration of reliability).
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Prior Use in Large-Scale Surveys and Intervention Evaluations. To reduce measurement development efforts and increase comparability with other national studies and intervention evaluations, many of the measures we chose were used in other studies and had demonstrated ease of administration and adequate psychometric properties. When we decided to use a measure that had not been used before, we worked with the author of the measure to determine whether we would expect it to work well in a national study with the characteristics of our study population.
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Low Cost and Burden. The measures we chose had to be administered
reliably by trained interviewers rather than require administration
by an experienced clinician. We also chose measures that posed
minimal burden on the parents and children.
The national team (MPR and Columbia) worked with the Early Head Start Research Consortium to nominate measures, modify existing measures as needed, create new measures as needed, and pretest the interviews and assessments with families and children similar to the Early Head Start study families. The measures and the variables constructed from them are briefly described in each chapter of this report. Psychometric properties of the measures are described in Appendix C.2.
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