Perinatal, Home Environment, and Infant Measures as Successful Predictors of Preschool Cognitive and Verbal Abilities

Abstract

This study investigated the extent to which predictions of preschool cognitive and language performance based on perinatal risk and SES measures could be improved adding measures of home environment and first-year performance on the Bayley Scales of Infant Development. The longitudinal sample of 53 female and 41 male children was subdivided into "low-risk" and "high-risk" groups based on perinatal risk scores. Results at 3 and 4 years of age are similar to those reported by Siegel (1982) and Smith, Flick, Ferriss, and Sellmann (1972), despite the use of a sample in the present study which did not have the extreme perinatal risk conditions found in samples used by previous investigations. The classification accuracy achieved using the Siegel Risk Index and SES items was high for both risk and age groups. The use of the HOME subscale scores generally resulted in improvements, particularly in classification accuracy. The results show that a variety of perinatal and social-environmental measures are important for predicting child outcomes across different ages and argue for the usefulness of considering individual predictor variables rather than summed predictors in predictive modelling.