Inside home visits: a collaborative look at process and quality

Home visit quality was assessed in an Early Head Start program (N = 92 fami lies) using measures developed in collaboration with program staff. Parent ratings were high, indicating "customer satisfaction" with home visiting. H ome visitors rated their relationships with parents as having a feeling of partnership and their home visits as typically going well. Researcher obser vations of home visits were consistent with the program's theory of change: Home visitors attempted to facilitate parent-child interaction, parents we re engaged in home visit activities, home visitors interacted mostly with b oth parent and child together. Families perceived by staff as improving the most had home visitors observed by researchers as most effective at engagi ng parents and involving parent and child together. Families seen as ''succ ess" cases showed consistently high engagement in home visits; while "non-s uccess" cases showed consistently low home visitor facilitation of parent-c hild interaction. Through a collaborative partnership, assessments of home visits were used to guide both program improvement and research. (C) 2001 E lsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.