Publisher:
Child Development Unit
Department Pediatrics
University of Louisville Health Service Center

Initial Material Cost:
None. The scale is available in the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology article cited below.

Representativeness of Norming Sample:
Instrument is not normed.

Languages:
English

Type of Assessment:
Parent report

Age Range and Administration Interval:
Age of children not specified, but the assessment appears targeted for homes with infants and toddlers.

Personnel, Training, Administration, and Scoring Requirements:
A caregiver or parent who is literate can answer the 15 items. Scoring requires summing the responses given by the parent and takes under 5 minutes.

Summary
Initial Material Cost: 1 (> $100)
Reliability: 3 (.65 or higher)
Validity: 2 (concurrent under .5)
Norming Sample Characteristics: 1 (none described)
Ease of Administration and Scoring: 2 (self-administered)

Description: The CHAOS scale is a questionnaire filled out by parents that is designed to assess the level of confusion and disorganization in the child’s home environment. The questionnaire consists of 15 statements, to each of which a parent or caregiver assigns a number between 1 and 4 that correspond to the following: 1 = Very much like your own home; 2 = Somewhat like your own home; 3 = A little bit like your own home; 4 = Not at all like your own home.

Uses of Information: The CHAOS scale screens for a chaotic home environment. High levels of chaos for at-risk children may warrant a more detailed environmental assessment to determine how and to what degree ongoing chaos is either compounding the effects of existing bioso-cial risks or attenuating the impact of corrective intervention.

Reliability: 1 (1) Internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha): For the entire scale, .79. (2) Test-retest reliability (12-month interval): for the total test score, .74.

Validity:2 (1) Concurrent validity: the CHAOS scale was compared with the physical and social environment codes in the Purdue Home Simulation Inventory (PHSI), which are completed by trained observers. The authors report that the correlations between the CHAOS scale and several of the PHSI social environment codes were significant (physical interference (correlation =-.36), number of known objects named (correlation =-.38), and ignores bids (correlation =.45)), and together, the PHSI social environment codes explained 59 percent of the variance in the CHAOS scores. The correlations between the CHAOS scale and several of the PHSI physical environment codes also were significant (number of siblings (correlation =.55) and number of rooms per person (correlation =-.33)), and together the PHSI physical environment codes explained 39 percent of the variance in the CHAOS scores.

Method of Scoring: The statements are scored using a 4-point scoring system. A single score is derived from the CHAOS questionnaire by summing the responses for the 15 items. A higher score represents characteristics of a more chaotic, disorganized, and hurried home.

Interpretability: The higher the score, the more chaotic a home is considered to be.

Training Support: None described.

Adaptations/Special Instructions for Individuals with Disabilities: None described.

Report Preparation Support: None described.

References:

Matheny, Adam P., Jr., Theodore D. Wachs, Jennifer L. Ludwig, and Kay Phillips. “Bringing Order Out of Chaos: Psychometric Characteristics of the Confusion, Hubbub, and Order Scale.” Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, vol. 16, 1995, pp. 429-444.