Enhancing Provider-Parent Collaborations: Understanding Home Visitors\u27 Awareness of their Families\u27 Beliefs About Play and Child Development

Home visiting is a service delivery method often used to support young children of low socioeconomic status (SES) and their families. The support provided to families’ early in their children’s lives is designed to buffer some of the risk that is present for children of low SES across developmental areas. Unfortunately, despite the large amount of funding that has been invested and the great need for effective home visiting services, home visiting research has produced inconsistent findings regarding its effectiveness. Further research is needed to determine which home visiting factors are associated with the effectiveness of home visiting programs. One key factor often explored through the home visiting research is the home visitor-parent relationship. Published literature across other fields demonstrates that an important facet of the development of the practitioner-client relationship is practitioners’ knowledge and understanding of clients’ beliefs. Unfortunately, the importance of home visitors’ awareness of and adjustment to families’ beliefs has not been discussed despite the discussion of this concept in other disciplines. Furthermore, despite the association between parents’ play beliefs and children’s play involvement and the fundamental role that play has in child-development focused home visiting programs, the home visiting literature does not discuss home visitor knowledge of parents’ play beliefs. Given these limitations of the home visiting literature, the present study examined the extent to which Early Head Start (EHS) home visitors (child development partners; CDPs) were knowledgeable about the play beliefs of the parents they served and whether their level of awareness of their parents’ play beliefs was associated with home visiting quality. Additionally, the present investigation examined the ways in which CDPs reported adapting their practice based on the play beliefs of the parents they serve. Findings demonstrated that there was large variability in CDPs’ awareness of the play beliefs of the families they served. The participating CDPs and parents reported on their personal play beliefs and tended to respond similarly. The relation between the match between the CDPs’ and parents’ personal play beliefs and the CDPs’ accuracy in predicting the parents’ play beliefs approached significance. Neither the duration of families’ enrollment nor the number of visits conducted between families and CDPs significantly predicted the CDPs’ awareness of the parents’ beliefs about play. The consistency between the CDPs’ predictions and parents’ reported beliefs was not a significant predictor of home visiting quality. Every CDP reported that she adjusts her practice based on the play beliefs of the parents she serves

Integrating the little talks intervention into Early Head Start: An experimental examination of implementation supports involving fidelity monitoring and performance feedback

Enriching home visiting services by incorporating scientifically-supported interventions is a means for improving their effectiveness in promoting child development. However, deliberate efforts to ensure that home visitors are fully knowledgeable and supported to implement interventions with parents of young children are necessary. In this experimental study, a randomly-assigned group of Early Head Start home visitors monitored the fidelity of their provision of a scientifically-based intervention, Little Talks, and the program\u27s general child development services. On a bi-weekly basis, home visitors received performance feedback specific to their implementation of Little Talks and based upon the fidelity data. Findings demonstrated that home visitors showed immediate and consistent mastery of the Little Talks content, while the quality of their implementation, including their clinical decision-making and collaborative processes, improved to adequate levels over time. The Little Talks home visitors showed generalized improvements in their ability to obtain Parent Input while providing the program\u27s typical child development services were detected. In fact, Little Talks home visitors\u27 were superior in obtaining Parent Input relative to comparison home visitors. Further, parents for whom low-quality intervention implementation was observed discontinued their enrollment in home visiting prematurely, while high-quality implementation was associated with sustained enrollment. Limitations for this study are identified, leading to future directions for advancing home visitors\u27 incorporation of evidence-based practices

Recruitment Experience in the First Phase of the African American Hereditary Prostate Cancer (AAHPC) Study

Abstract available at publisher's web site.http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S1047-2797(00)00194-