The development of an instrument measuring unintentional injuries in young children in low-income settings to serve as an evaluation tool for a childhood home injury prevention program.
OBJECTIVE
Responding to the lack of standardized instrumentation, especially as applied in low-income contexts, the researchers decided that an instrument should be developed to serve as an evaluation tool for a childhood (unintentional) injury prevention program as well as a tool from which injury risks (poisonings, burns and falls) could be identified within households.


METHODS
Cross-sectional samples of 521 households in four low-income sites in Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa, participated in the three phases of the study. The generation of an item pool based on a table of specifications, subsequent scientific item reduction procedures, reviews from experts and pilot tests were used to develop the scales for measuring the injury risks.


RESULTS
The developed instrument complies with all the requirements for a valid and reliable measurement instrument.


CONCLUSIONS
The instrument allows valid comparison of risks between communities, as well as before and after comparisons for an intervention program.


CONCLUSIONS
The provision of this instrument may bring enormous benefits to research studies. It can also provide proactive, rather than reactive, information about injury risks before they develop into injuries and thus allows focusing of safety efforts for improvement of problematic areas in the households.
Jordaan
E R
ER
esme.jordaan@mrc.ac.za
Atkins
S
S
van Niekerk
A
A
Seedat
M
M
D000056:Accident Prevention; D000061:Accidents, Home / Q000517:prevention & control*; D002648:Child; D003430:Cross-Sectional Studies; D006801:Humans; D011203:Poverty; D011594:Psychometrics; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D018570:Risk Assessment / Q000379:methods*; D013019:South Africa; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires