The HOME Inventory is one of the world's most widely used measures of the home environment. It provides information from six to eight key dimensions of children's experiences at home (depending upon the age of the child). It has been used in more than 40 countries. The four current age-based versions of the Inventory (covering infancy through early adolescence) have been used in hundreds of publications and are currently being used as part of numerous longitudinal studies involving family life and child health and development. It is being used with a diversity of racial and ethnic groups. It is a part of several major longitudinal surveys sponsored by NIH and related agencies, including The National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NICHD), The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (NICHD), The New Immigrant Study (NICHD), The Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Study (ACF), The Maternal Lifestyle Study (NIDA), The Family Life Project (NICHD), and The Legacy of Children Study (CDC). Even so, the measure has limitations and there is need to update HOME so that it captures key aspects of the home environment for diverse populations. There is also need to extend the measure so that it applies to children in mid-to-late adolescence, thus allowing continuous study of environment-development relations from infancy through adolescence.
The aim of this project is to do the necessary consultations with experts in family life and child development, review of relevant literature, and secondary data analysis of current forms of the HOME Inventory and related measures so as to construct candidate sets of indicators that can be used for a full scale restandardization, renorming and validation of the current for age-related version plus construction of a new version for mid-to-late adolescence. Approximately 80 candidate indicators for each of the five planned versions of HOME will be identified. Such revisions and the addition of the new version will enable a new generation of longitudinal studies that cover all periods of childhood. The new versions will make it more useful for cross-cultural studies as well.
What children experience in their home environments is strongly implicated their paths of health and development. The HOME Inventory is among the most widely used measures of children's environment throughout the world and is currently used in several ongoing national surveys of child well-being. The purpose of this project is to identify sets of candidate indicators to be included in revised versions of the HOME Inventory so that it better captures key aspects of home experience for diverse cultural groups and to extend its usefulness to children in late adolescence.
| Bradley, Robert H (2015) Constructing and Adapting Causal and Formative Measures of Family Settings: The HOME Inventory as Illustration. J Fam Theory Rev 7:381-414 |
| Bradley, Robert H; Pennar, Amy; Iida, Masumi (2015) Ebb and Flow in Parent-Child Interactions: Shifts from Early through Middle Childhood. Parent Sci Pract 15:295-320 |
| Bradley, Robert H; Pennar, Amy; Glick, Jennifer (2014) Home environments of infants from immigrant families in the United States: findings from the new immigrant survey. Infant Ment Health J 35:565-79 |
| Bradley, Robert H; Corwyn, Robert (2013) From parent to child to parent…: paths in and out of problem behavior. J Abnorm Child Psychol 41:515-29 |
