The Home Inventory: Review and Reflections

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Introduction

The 1960s ushered in a new era of concern about children's environments and the impact they have on children's development. The scholarship of that era introduced an array of new concepts to the field concerning the linkage between environment and development, including Hunt's (1961) concept of the “match” between developmental needs and environmental opportunities, Bloom's (1964) concept of the “powerful environment,” the concepts of sensitive, responsive caregiving that flowed from Bowlby's (1958) work, and general concepts such as the “deprived” environment. These works, especially Bloom's, also impelled efforts to develop measures of the environment. These measures were concrete ways of attempting to consolidate a potentially significant set of empirical and clinical findings and to operationalize a potentially rich montage of scientific concepts. Such was the goal of Bettye Caldwell and her colleagues at the Syracuse Early Learning Center as they constructed the first version of the Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment (HOME) Inventory (Caldwell, Heider, & Kaplan, 1966).

HOME is intended to measure the quality and quantity of stimulation and support available to a child in the home environment. Information needed to score the Inventory is obtained during a 45–90-min home visit. The target child and the primary caregiver must be present and awake. The procedure involves semistructured observation and an interview conduced to minimize obtrusiveness and to allow family members to act normally. The focus is on the child in the environment; the child as a recipient of inputs from objects, events, and transactions occurring in the family surroundings. The initial version of the inventory was intended for use during the infant–toddler (birth to age 3 yr) period. It contains 45 binary-choice items clustered into 6 subscales: (a) Acceptance of Child, (b) Learning Materials, (c) Parental Involvement, (d) Parental Responsivity, (e) Variety in Experience, and (f) Organization of the Environment. The Early Childhood HOME is for use between 3 and 6 yr of age. It contains 55 items clustered into eight subscales: (a) Acceptance of Child, (b) Learning Materials, (c) Parental Responsivity, (d) Physical Environment, (e) Variety in Experience, (f) Language Stimulation, (g) Learning Stimulation, and (h) Modeling of Social Maturity. The Middle Childhood HOME is for use between 6 and 10 yr. It contains 59 items clustered into eight subscales: (a) Learning Materials, (b) Parental Involvement, (c) Parental Responsivity, (d) Physical Environment, (e) Active Stimulation, (f) Emotional climate, (g) Encouraging Maturity, and (h) Family Participation. Early Adolescent HOME is for use from 10 to 15 yr of age.

Section snippets

Technical Attributes of the HOME Inventory

The purpose of this review is to use HOME as a marker to help identify consistencies in patterns of relations between home environment and children's development and health. Psychometric properties of the inventory are discussed in the test manual (Caldwell & Bradley, 1984) and in several review articles (Bradley, 1982, Bradley and Caldwell, 1988, Elardo and Bradley, 1981). For all items, a “yes” rating indicates the presence of a condition that theory or research indicates is conducive to

INFANCY THROUGH MIDDLE CHILDHOOD

Correlations between the Infant–Toddler HOME and measures of infant developmental status (usually the Bayley Scales) rarely exceed .40 during the first year of life (Adams et al., 1984, Allen et al., 1984, Bakeman and Brown, 1980, Bee et al., 1984, Carlson et al., 1986, Coll et al., 1986, Cooney et al., 1989, Elardo et al., 1975, Eyres et al., 1979, Johnson et al., 1984, Moore et al., 1989, Park et al., (in press), Parks and Smeriglio, 1986, Pederson et al., 1988, Siegel, 1984, Stevenson and

Language Development

Closely related to studies of HOME and intelligence are studies of HOME and language competence. Elardo, Bradley, and Caldwell (1977) obtained moderate correlations between 6-month HOME and 37-month scores on the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities (ITPA). Variety, Learning Materials, Involvement, and Responsivity shared between 18 and 21% common variance with ITPA subtests. Two-year HOME displayed an even stronger association with the ITPA (up to .62). Substantial correlations between

LOW BIRTH WEIGHT CHILDREN

Sameroff and Chandler (1975) convincingly established that development in low birth weight children is closely tied to the socioeconomic circumstances in which the children live. They marshaled evidence in support of the position that a child's family milieu was more often implicated in poor developmental outcomes than was any particular biologic problem or medical complication. Sameroff and Chandler acknowledged exceptions in such cases as severe trauma and low birth weight accompanied by

Conditions Affecting the Home Environment-Cognitive Development Relationship

Several factors contribute to the difficulty of parceling out the relationship between home environment and the development of cognitive and communicative competence. First, much about continuity of development itself is not well understood (Bornstein & Krasnegor, 1989). Second, environmental factors tend to be substantially intercorrelated, undermining efforts to determine which particular factors are functionally related to development. Third, the environment is moderately stable, undermining

TEMPERAMENT

Seven studies have dealt with the relation of HOME to infant temperament (Affleck et al., 1982, Consullo, 1992, Daniels and Plomin, 1985, Daniels et al., 1984, Gandour, 1989, Houldin et al., 1989, Matheny et al., 1987, Medcoff-Cooper and Schraeder, 1982, Schraeder and Cooper, 1983). No evidence of a relation was found in four studies. In the other three, significant correlations were observed, reaching as high as .72. Stronger associations were observed for children (low birth weight, disabled)

Health-Related Outcomes

HOME has been used in a variety of studies that deal with health issues. The majority of these studies have dealt either with child maltreatment or lead burden, both of which are environmentally based health problems (Harvey, 1991).

Parental Correlates

Many of the items on the HOME Inventory index objects and parenting practices more common to better educated, wealthier families. Most investigators have found low to moderate correlations between HOME and social status variables (Adams et al., 1984; Allen et al., 1983; Barnard et al., 1984b, Bradley et al., 1989a, Bradley et al., 1991, Brumitt and Jacobson, 1989, Caldwell, 1967, Gottfried and Gottfried, 1984, Hollenbeck, 1978, Honig and Mayne, 1982, Kurtz et al., 1988, Nihira et al., 1981,

Conclusions

The HOME Inventories have been widely used in studies of child behavior and development. Nonetheless, its actual value as a measure of the quality of stimulation, support, and structure available to children in their home environments rests on its validity as applied in a wide array of studies. Thus, several aspects of validity need to be evaluated as they apply to HOME after 25 yr of use in many different contexts.

With respect to construct validity, one must ask: Is the pattern of relations

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