Observing home‐visiting quality across time: A longitudinal reliability study of the Home Visit Rating Scales

Facilitating caregiver-child interactions in home visiting: A qualitative observational study

Facilitating parent-child interactions is a key component of evidence-based early childhood home visiting programs. Several observational measures have been created to effectively capture home visiting activities from an operationalized perspective. While the field has a reasonable understanding of what home visitors can do to facilitate developmentally supportive interactions, and why, the how remains elusive for many home visitors. This qualitative study used a modified grounded theory approach to examine the facilitation of caregiver-child interactions during home visits. Home visit video recordings previously coded using the Home Visit Rating Scale (HOVRS) A+ were selected based on facilitation quality. Sixteen home visits (8 lower- and 8 higher-quality facilitation scores) were examined for differences in home visitor behaviors that support parent-child interactions during visits. We identified contextual and specific behaviors that home visitors used to actively engage caregivers and children together in developmentally supportive interactions. Results revealed 11 home visitor behaviors that discriminated higher quality facilitation. These behaviors were categorized into four domains: environmental conditions, executing the activity, strengths-based focus, and caregiver responses. This qualitative study highlights specific behaviors and professional development areas to support more effective home visiting services for a diverse population of families with young children.

Strengthening Home Visitor Practice Through an Embedded Model of Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health Consultation

Home visitors face the difficult task of engaging and supporting families who experience economic, social, and mental health challenges. Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health Consultation (IECMHC) is one strategy to improve early childhood professionals' abilities to promote maternal and children's mental health through relationship building and collaboration. To date, most of the evidence showing positive effects of IECMHC comes from evaluations conducted in center-based early childhood programs. Only a few have examined the implementation and outcomes of IECMHC in home visiting programs. Using a longitudinal, matched-comparison group design, a three-year pilot study of a cross-system, embedded model of IECMHC assessed implementation and outcomes for teachers and home visitors. Here, we focus on intervention effects on home visitor-family relationships based on an analysis of 42 recordings of home visits. We used the Home Visit Rating Scales Adapted & Extended to Excellence (HOVRS-A+ v.2.1; Roggman et al., in  2010) and created another scale, the IECMHC scale, of items aligned with the expected outcomes of the model. Home visitors in the intervention group scored significantly higher on the HOVRS-A+ home visitor responsiveness to family scale over time than those in the comparison group. Additionally, scores of home visitors in the intervention group increased at a greater rate, on average, on the newly developed IECMHC scale than scores of home visitors in the comparison group. We conclude that the Illinois model of IECMHC successfully improved home visitors' responsiveness to families and improved the quality of home visits. Due to the small sample, we recommend further study of the model in home visiting and further development of the IECMHC scale as part of the HOVRS-A+ .

The Home Visit Rating Scales: Revised, restructured, and revalidated

The Home Visit Rating Scales (HOVRS) were initially developed from field-based descriptions of successful home visits and are supported by home-visiting research in multiple disciplines. Four home-visiting practices scales include indicators of relationship building with families, responsiveness to family strengths, facilitation of parent-child interaction, and collaboration with parents. Three family engagement scales include indicators of parent-child interaction, parent engagement, and child engagement in the visit. The original version, the HOVRS-1, was validated using video and data from two Early Head Start home-visiting programs. Conceptual and structural changes for the HOVRS-3 were designed to improve readability, usability, and clarity. Newly trained observers used the HOVRS-3 to observe archived videos from the original measurement sample. The HOVRS-3 showed good interrater reliability, scale internal consistency, convergent validity, predictive validity, practical significance, and version stability. When the HOVRS-3 home-visit quality scores were higher, it was twice as likely for parenting scores to be average or better and for child language to be at age level or better at age 3 years, over and above parenting and child language at age 1 year. The HOVRS can guide observations of home-visit quality in infant-toddler and early childhood programs to improve home-visiting practices and family engagement.

Observing home-visit quality with the home visit rating scales: Introduction to the special section

Evidence-based home-visiting programs aim to address one of the most important challenges facing our species-setting the next generation on a healthy path of development that prepares them for a future that is simultaneously uncertain and promising. Diverse research literatures have pointed to practices to effectively meet this challenge and better achieve the unfulfilled promise of home visiting by more effectively engaging parents in supporting their children's early development and well-being. Measures of home-visit quality practices drawn from social work, pediatric nursing, early childhood, and early intervention research literatures have identified building relationships with families and focusing on their strengths as effective, practices that are particularly important for vulnerable families. The articles in this special section used the Home Visit Rating Scales to examine stability in home-visit quality over time, study specific home-visiting processes linked with quality, validate a supervisor checklist of home-visiting implementation, and consider the home visit in relation to an array of indicators reflecting overall home-visiting program strength and stability. These articles exemplify progress in home-visiting research over recent decades, including advances in direct observational methods and measurement as well as examinations of home visiting as an observable process across various home-visiting program models and populations.