Background

More than two million U.S. families receive home visiting services each year, yet little is known about the content and process of home visit interventions. Home visit observations are a recommended tool to address this gap in knowledge, but guidance regarding how much observation time is needed to provide a trustworthy picture of home visits is not available.

Objective

This study estimated the length of observation needed to provide a reliable description of the content and process of home visits delivered through an Early Head Start (EHS) home-based program.

Methods

Observations of 555 home visits involving 88 families and 17 home visitors were coded with the Home Visit Observation Form-Revised (HVOF-R). The HVOF-R describes the proportions of time spent among several subcategories within each of three major categories: Primary Interaction Partners, Content of Interactions, and Nature of the Home Visitor’s Interactions. The psychometric theory of test reliability guided use of bootstrap resampling and the Spearman-Brown prediction formula to estimate the duration of observation necessary to achieve conventional psychometric standards of reliability (r  = .90 and r  = .80).

Results

Results showed that 40–60 min of a home visit observation yields a reliable estimate of the proportion of time spent on most key features of home visits, especially those behaviors observed most frequently, including interactions among the home visitor, parent, and/or child.

Conclusion

Fairly brief observations yield reliable description of home visit activities, and use of observation is recommended to guide program implementation efforts and enhance program quality.

中文翻译：

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估计家庭访问活动：需要多少观察？

背景

每年有超过200万美国家庭获得家访服务，但对家访干预的内容和过程知之甚少。推荐使用家访观察来解决这一知识差距，但是尚无有关需要多少观察时间来提供可信赖的家访情况的指南。

客观的

这项研究估计了观察所需的时间，以提供对通过早期抢先体验（EHS）家庭计划提供的家访内容和过程的可靠描述。

方法

修订后的“家庭访问观察表”（HVOF-R）对涉及88个家庭和17个家庭访问者的555次家庭访问的观察结果进行了编码。HVOF-R描述了以下三个主要类别中的几个子类别之间花费的时间比例：主要互动伙伴，互动内容和家庭访问者互动的性质。测试可靠性的心理计量学理论指导使用自举重采样和Spearman-Brown预测公式来估计达到常规常规心理计量学可靠性标准（r  = .90和r  = .80）所需的观察时间。

结果

结果表明，一次家庭访问观察的40-60分钟可以可靠地估算出在大多数主要访问特征（尤其是最频繁观察到的行为，包括家庭访问者，父母和/或孩子之间的互动）上花费的时间比例。

结论

相当简短的观察结果可以可靠地描述家访活动，建议使用观察结果来指导计划实施工作并提高计划质量。