title: The development of an observation tool for use with parents with psychiatric disability and their preschool children.
abstract: Community-based treatment and care of people with psychiatric disabilities has meant that they are now more likely to engage in the parenting role. This has led to the development of programs designed to enhance the parenting skills of people with psychiatric disabilities. Evaluation of these programs has been hampered by a paucity of evaluation tools. This study's aim was to develop and trial a tool that examined the parent-child interaction within a group setting, was functional and easy to use, required minimum training and equipment, and had acceptable levels of reliability and validity. The revised tool yielded a single scale with acceptable reliability. It had discriminative validity and concurrent validity with non-independent global ratings of parenting. Sensitivity to change was not investigated. The findings suggest that this method of evaluating parenting is likely to have both clinical and research utility and further investigation of the psychometric properties of the tool is warranted.
authors.affiliation: Rehabilatation Services, Gold Coast Hospital, Australia.
authors.forename: Hazel
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Bassett
authors.forename: Robert
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: King
authors.forename: Chris
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Lloyd
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D016241:Child of Impaired Parents / Q000523:psychology*; D002675:Child, Preschool; D004493:Education; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D019370:Observation; D015588:Observer Variation; D010287:Parent-Child Relations; D016487:Parenting / Q000523:psychology; D010552:Personality Assessment / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D019989:Persons with Intellectual Disabilities / Q000523:psychology*; D011594:Psychometrics / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D012931:Social Environment