This project proposes to develop an Ecocultural Scale (ECS) for two ethnic populations. Two populations (Euro-Americans and Asian-Americans) consist of families with developmentally delayed/disabled (DD) children. Although there is widespread agreement that family social ecology is an important influence in family responses to having a DD child, empirically validated assessments of family ecology that have been specifically developed for such families are not available. The ECS will be a theoretically derived, empirically based, and psychometrically sound instrument. It is intended for research use as well as for use by those involved in service delivery. Ecocultural theory proposes a set of 12 domains likely to be important in family responses to delayed children. Previous work has led to the development of measures specific to families with DD children and the derivation of a set of factor scores to assess these 12 domains. This previous work has also demonstrated that these ecocultural factors (which include measures of workload, religiosity, peer and playgroup influences, father and mother roles, information-seeking, the child's disruption of the family daily routine, and others) are associated with how families organize their everyday routines of life and with child developmental outcomes. The ECS will be derived from ecocultural theory and from prior research with the two ethnic populations. The ecocultural assessment methods developed to date are valuable for research use but are not amenable to easy, relatively brief administration to families; neither do they have standardized norms overall or for the specific ethnic populations.
Five specific aims are: (a) describe salient dimensions of the eurocultural context of families with DD children, that are meaningful within, as well as between, Euro-American and Asian-American families; (b) based on 166 field interviews with samples from each ethnic group, prepare an ECS scale that can be administered in home visits/interviews with parents or parent figures; (c) describe psychometric characteristics of the ECS scale for the overall sample and for each of the two ethnic samples; (d) examine the relationship between the ECS and other existing measures of home environment and family relations; and (e) investigate the relationship between the ECS and selected child outcome measures.
