Abstract
Understanding the convergence between parent report and clinician observation measures of development is important and became even more critical during the COVID-19 pandemic as clinician contact with families was significantly limited. Previous research points to inconsistencies in the degree of agreement between parents and clinicians and very little research has examined these associations for infants within the first year of life. This study investigated the association between parent report and clinician observation measures of social communication and motor skills in 27 young infants who were assessed at 9 and 12 months of age. Results suggest a strong relation between clinician and parent rated motor skills, but weak to moderate associations between clinician and parent rated communication skills. Infant temperament played a significant role in parent ratings of infant communication. Together, these results provide support for data collection via parent report or clinician observation of infant motor skills, but suggest that multiple measures of infant communication may be helpful to obtain high-quality, perhaps more accurate, assessment social-communication skills. Specifically, multiple parent report measures along with an observation of parent-infant interactions will likely provide a more rich and accurate characterization of infant social-communication abilities.
Highlights
Mapping precise developmental change in infancy has resulted in significant theoretical and empirical advancements in developmental science (Oakes and Rakison, 2020; Iverson, 2021)
Precise understanding of agreement between parent report and clinician observation measures may be especially valuable for assessing communication in young, preverbal infants for which adult interpretation of infant behavior is a critical component
Our results demonstrate that agreement between parents and clinicians was highly dependent on the specific developmental domain being assessed
Summary
Mapping precise developmental change in infancy has resulted in significant theoretical and empirical advancements in developmental science (Oakes and Rakison, 2020; Iverson, 2021). During the COVID-19 pandemic, many developmental studies that relied on direct, clinician-administered measures of developmental skills were forced to transition to online, parentreport methods (Hunersen et al, 2021). Studies that collected only clinician-administered data, or both clinician observation and parent report data, transitioned to using parent report data only This transition has highlighted the importance of understanding concordance between parent report and clinician observation measures of developmental skills. While multi-informant assessment of child skills has proven to be more valuable than single-informant methods in clinical settings (Li et al, 2019), the convergence and possible interchangeability of parent report and Interrater Agreement in Infant Skills clinician observation developmental measures in infancy, especially within the first year of life, is not well understood. Knowledge of how parent report assessment of child skills converge with clinician observation assessments could lead to increasing popularity of online developmental studies, which will increase accessibility for underrepresented populations in research
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