The Infant/Toddler Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment (IT-HOME) Validity and Reliability Study for Turkey

Physical and social environments, particularly the home environment in infancy, bring substantial impacts on child development; therefore, growth may be promoted when the home environment is duly regarded. Ultimately, the present study was conducted with 203 infants and toddlers living in Ankara (51% were females) and attempted to adapt the Infant-Toddler Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment (IT-HOME) into Turkish to evaluate the home environment for children up to 3 years of age. While 33% of the children were 3–12 months, 34% were 13–24 months, and 33% were 25–36 months. We collected the data using a demographic information form, the IT-HOME, and the Ages and Stages Questionnaires-Turkish Version (ASQ-TV). Accordingly, for linguistic validity, we calculated the consistency between the original scale and its back-translation to be 92%. Moreover, the Lawshe method adopted to analyze the expert opinions yielded content validity indices (CVI) to range between +0.88 and +1.00 for the dimensions of the IT-HOME. The analyses for criterion validity yielded positive and significant correlations between the dimensions of the IT-HOME and components of the ASQ-TV (r = 0.146–0.369). We then calculated the test-retest and interrater reliability coefficients to be 0.745 and 0.989, respectively. In conclusion, in the current study, the IT-HOME was found to demonstrate good initial interrater and test-retest reliability and content validity in a Turkish sample.