Impact of Completing Infant Developmental Questionnaires on At-Risk Mothers

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the use of developmental questionnaires with a sample of at-risk mothers. Thirty-six mothers with infants between 4 and 30 months were randomly assigned to experimental or control condition. Mothers in the experimental group each completed one Infant Monitoring Questionnaire (IMQ) on their infants. Infants in both groups were assessed with the Bayley Scales of Infant Development, and all mothers completed the Bayley Interview, an interview in which items from the Bayley Scales of Infant Development have been modified into a parent interview format. Mothers in the experimental group had scores on the Bayley Interview more in agreement with the professional-completed Bayley assessment of the infant than mothers who had not completed an IMQ (t = -1.81, p < .04). Correlations between scaled scores from the mother-completed Bayley Interview and the professional-completed Bayley assessment were high for the experimental group (r = .80) and were significantly different from the correlations for the contol group (r = .25). Validity, measured by the percentage of agreement between the infant's classification (i.e., normal or abnormal) based on the questionnaires completed by at-risk mothers and the classification based on the professionally administered standardized assessments of the infants, was also high (89%).