The home inventory of dangers and safety precautions-2: Addressing critical needs for prescriptive assessment devices in child maltreatment and in healthcare
Aj. Tymchuk et al., The home inventory of dangers and safety precautions-2: Addressing critical needs for prescriptive assessment devices in child maltreatment and in healthcare, CHILD ABUSE, 23(1), 1999, pp. 1-14
Objective: This paper describes the development and preliminary validation
of a prescriptive home danger and safety precaution instrument containing 1
4 epidemiological categories to be used in the design and evaluation of fam
ily-tailored injury prevention and safety interventions.
Method: The HIDSP-2 evolved from application and revision of the previous h
ome danger and safety precaution recognition and observation instruments. A
s part of this process, the suitability of the HIDSP-2 for use in a broad-b
ased trial was evaluated with 29 low income parents exhibiting individual l
earning needs. Inter-rarer reliability and stability of scores were examine
d. 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 precaution
s was demonstrated. Stability of observation was high. Alphas as a measure
of internal consistency was satisfactory for total danger and precautions s
eparately; however, those fur most individual categories were low. There wa
s significant reduction in the number of dangers identified initially and s
ignificant 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 fo
r remediating home dangers and implementing precautions. While we see this
instrument as eminently suitable for use in broad-based interventions and i
n epidemiological studies, further research must continue to examine the ps
ychometric characteristics of the individual danger and precaution categori
es. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd.