The HOME inventory: a new scale for families of pre- and early adolescent children with disabilities.
The PA-HOME gives BCBAs a quick parent form that maps the teen home setting and links to child skills.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team built a new 80-item form called the PA-HOME. It asks parents about the home setting for 10- to 15-year-olds with disabilities.
They checked that the questions hang together and relate to other family and child scores.
What they found
The PA-HOME gave steady, middle-level links with family warmth and child skills. It acts like earlier HOME forms, but it fits the teen years.
How this fits with other research
Rousey et al. (2002) looked at the older Family Environment Scale. They saw scores stay almost the same for seven to nine years. Charlop et al. (1992) fills a gap by giving a tool made for the disability teen window.
Schwartz et al. (2018) made a quick PROMIS scale for how involved kids with ASD feel in family life. Their work and the PA-HOME both add fresh ways to look at the family unit, not just the child.
Guyard et al. (2012) measured how cerebral palsy changes parents’ lives. Their FICD+4 and the PA-HOME can be used side-by-side: one shows impact, the other shows setting.
Why it matters
You now have a ready-made parent form that captures the teen home world. Pair it with skill or impact tools to see why some kids make faster gains. If you write social-skill goals, add PA-HOME items to pick home factors you can shape.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
A preliminary form of a new version of the Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment (HOME) is presented. It is designed for use with families of children aged 10-15. The 80-item preliminary version of the Preadolescent HOME (PA-HOME) was field tested on 117 children with varying disabilities. The 80 items were selected from a pool of over 250 items by means of several field tests and accompanying item analyses. Both factor analyses and item analyses were used to help pare down items and produce a scale with acceptable psychometric properties. The psychometric properties of the PA-HOME are quite similar to those reported for the other three versions of the HOME Inventory. It appears to be a reasonably reliable scale with moderate correlations with other measures of the family environment, such as SES, social support, and marital stability. It has low to moderate correlations with measures of child competence in this sample of children with disabilities. The correlations are of the same general magnitude of correlations between the Infant-Toddler, Early Childhood, and Middle Childhood versions of HOME in samples of younger children with disabilities.
Research in developmental disabilities, 1992 · doi:10.1016/0891-4222(92)90009-u