THE ORGANIZATION OF A NATIONAL SURVEY FOR EVALUATING CHILD PSYCHOMOTOR DEVELOPMENT IN ARGENTINA

A total of 211 selected paediatricians were invited to participate in a national survey designed to evaluate the age of attainment of develo pmental milestones in children aged 0-5 years. Following a pilot study and a cascade training design, 61.1% of the paediatricians successful ly completed the data collection on 139 developmental items. In the pi lot study, there were more missing (not performed) items in children o ver one year of age, thus confirming the impression that paediatrician s are more familiar with evaluating development in infants. However, i n the age range 1-5 years, there were significantly fewer missing item s in the gross motor area than in the other areas. Following a trainin g programme and data editing and cleaning, a final sample of 3573 heal thy, normal children was obtained. The impact of the training process was significant, in the sense that 3.5% of the items in children older than one year were not performed by the paediatricians before trainin g, but this percentage was reduced to 1.9% after training (P<0.01). Th e sample formed 0.11% of the national population less than 6 years of age and included a sex ratio of 1.01 compared with a national ratio of 1.02. There were no significant differences in the geographical distr ibution of the sample in comparison with that of the national populati on. The social composition, assessed by maternal education level, was biased towards a better education level than the national population. Mean Z-scores for height and weight were not significantly different f rom zero, when calculated on the basis of the national growth standard s. In addition to successfully obtaining a representative sample for t he analysis of the age of attainment of developmental milestones in Ar gentinian children, the survey also accomplished an educational object ive in the training of paediatricians in developmental paediatrics.