A Comparison of Russian Infants and Toddlers with the Reference Norms of the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development-III

Abstract

Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development – Third Edition (Bayley-III) is globally recognized method for the assessment of a child neuropsychological development. The using of Bayley-III in Russia is limited due to the lack of adaptation. In this study we used Bayley-III in the series of neuropsychological assessments of 85 healthy Russian children from 4 months to 3 years (280 measurements in total). Results: In the first year of life neuropsychological development of the Russian children was very close to the norms established for the US population except for the slightly higher score on cognitive scale. After the first year of life, Russian children constantly demonstrated higher scores on all scales (cognitive, receptive communication, fine and gross motor) compared to the US norms. except for the similar/lower scores on expressive communication. The revealed features of children's development should be carefully extrapolated to the entire Russian population, taking into account the pilot nature of the study and the limited representativeness of the studied sample. Nevertheless, the present study shows the importance of local adaptation of foreign psychometric instruments, taking into account local linguistic and cultural characteristics, as well as the importance of developing national age norms for the neuropsychic development of children. In general, further studies on larger multicenter samples are needed to clarify the identified patterns and the widespread application of such a psychometric tool as the Bailey-III scales.