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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).

  • 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.

  • 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. The father study measures and their psychometric properties are also described in Appendix C.2.

 

 

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