Stability of measures of the home environment for families of children with severe disabilities.
The Family Environment Scale stays stable for 7–9 years in families of children with severe disabilities, so yearly re-testing is unnecessary.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Rousey et al. (2002) tracked the Family Environment Scale for 7–9 years in families raising children with severe disabilities.
They wanted to know if the FES scores stayed the same or shifted as kids grew older.
What they found
The FES stayed highly stable. Families who scored high or low at the start still looked the same almost a decade later.
This means the tool gives a steady picture of family life and does not need yearly re-testing.
How this fits with other research
Moss et al. (2008) saw the same long-term steadiness with the ADI-R autism interview over about seven years, backing the idea that some key measures hold still.
Yaari et al. (2016) looks like a contradiction. They found early autism risk screens in pre-term babies jumped around a lot. The difference is age and tool: tiny infants versus mixed-age families, and a quick screen versus a deep family scale.
Giserman-Kiss et al. (2020) adds that early ASD diagnosis itself is stable for 88% of kids, showing stability can happen even while child skills improve.
Why it matters
If you use the FES during intake, you can trust that score for years. Skip annual re-tests and spend that time on intervention instead. Just re-give it after big family changes like divorce or a new sibling.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The stability of home environment in families of children with severe disabilities was investigated. Sixty-four families were assessed at three time points regarding aspects of their home environment. Family environment scale, home quality rating scale (HQRS) and home observation for measurement of the environment scores were collected at 7 and 9 years after the initial assessment. A remarkable degree of stability was observed, particularly for the FES. The median change score was zero for most subscales; no correlations differed significantly between the 7- and 9-year retests. A repeated measures MANOVA found a significant change in scores over time for only one subscale of the HQRS but none of the 10 FES subscales. Results suggest that, for the FES, administration of these measures every 2 years, perhaps less often, would be sufficient in longitudinal studies of this population. Internal consistency reliability of the FES was lower for these families than in the standardization samples, emphasizing the need to validate measures used with special populations.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2002 · doi:10.1016/s0891-4222(01)00089-0