The home inventory of dangers and safety precautions-2: addressing critical needs for prescriptive assessment devices in child maltreatment and in healthcare

Abstract

Objective: This paper describes the development and preliminary validation of a prescriptive home danger and safety precaution instrument containing 14 epidemiological categories to be used in the design and evaluation of family-tailored injury prevention and safety interventions. Method: The HIDSP-2 evolved from application and revision of the previous home danger and safety precaution recognition and observation instruments. As part of this process, the suitability of the HIDSP-2 for use in a broad-based trial was evaluated with 29 low income parents exhibiting individual learning needs. Inter-rater reliability and stability of scores were examined. Internal consistency was examined for total dangers and precautions and for those categories in which there were sufficient items to do so. Results: Administrative time was reduced while continuing usefulness in the identification and remediation of dangers and implementation of precautions was demonstrated. Stability of observation was high. Alphas as a measure of internal consistency was satisfactory for total danger and precautions separately; however, those for most individual categories were low. There was significant reduction in the number of dangers identified initially and significant improvement in the safety precautions implemented. Conclusions: The HIDSP-2 can assist healthcare, education, disability, and child protective service workers in the development of home safety plans for remediating home dangers and implementing precautions. While we see this instrument as eminently suitable for use in broad-based interventions and in epidemiological studies, further research must continue to examine the psychometric characteristics of the individual danger and precaution categories.