M ost approaches to determining effectiveness in early intervention emphasize data collection procedures that are objective, unbiased, and reliable. Subjective views held by individuals usually are considered unreliable, and less relevant to early intervention efficacy research. However, systematic investigations of how early intervention services are viewed subjectively by both recipients and providers can facilitate the interpretation of efficacy data gained when more traditional, objective methods are used. This article describes Q methodology, a technique that can be used to gain important insights on individuals' judgments, attitudes, and points of view on topics or situations that involve early intervention effectiveness issues.
Examples of Q application drawn from the extant literature of several disciplines are used to indicate how the technique might be used to address important questions of early intervention effectiveness. Specific steps involved in Q methodology are illustrated in a description of an early intervention efficacy study designed to explore views of family-centered practices held by family members of children enrolled in early intervention programs.The director of an early intervention program would like to know what importance families involved in her program place on familycentered practices that have been identified as program quality indicators. Based on her 10 years of experience, she believes families may differ in their viewpoints about the importance of various practices. Further, she wonders if groups of families that value certain practices share common attributes.
Do those families who have been involved in intervention for longer periods of time, for example, have viewpoints that differ from families who recently have entered the program? Finally, she wonders about the stability of families' viewpoints about family-centered services. Do viewpoints change over time?A community inclusion specialist is interested in studying the attitudes of childcare teachers about inclusion. He realizes that providing early intervention services for young children with disabilities and their families in settings that contain typically developing children is an important program quality indicator. As a result of experience, he is convinced that the attitudes held by day-care teachers about inclusion influence their instructional practices and classroom behaviors. He speculates that attitudes about inclusion vary as a result of the amounts of experience teachers have with children who have disabilities.These scenarios pose questions that deal with human subjectivity, an individual's point of view, and some aspect of early intervention effectiveness. How to address questions involving human subjectivity scientifically continues to present major challenges for those involved with the design, delivery, and evaluation of early intervention services. For example, decision makers increasingly demand phenomenological descriptions of how services were viewed by both recipients and providers. Such qualita...
One of the most hotly debated issues in the assessment of infants and young children with handicaps has been the role of parents in the assessment process. Traditionally, professionals have excluded from consideration parental judgments of child developmental status on the assumption that such data are inflated. The present study compared maternal judgments about the developmental status of their children enrolled in early intervention programs with independently obtained developmental testing data for the 53 children. The results indicated that (a) maternal and professional estimates were highly correlated; (b) mothers systematically provided higher estimates across developmental domains; and (c) child IQ was the most noteworthy predictor of agreement in developmental estimates derived from mothers. Results of this study suggest the need for close family-professional collaboration during the entire intervention process, because the two data sources order children similarly, but parental data result in overestimates of development relative to actual performance data.
This descriptive study examined the inservice training perceptions and suggestions of 242 early childhood service providers in Louisiana. These interventionists indicated that they had primarily or exclusively experienced more passive types of inservice training strategies than active kinds of strategies. Few participants reported having experienced support following training. In general, these interventionists rated passive didactic training techniques, such as lectures, handouts, and lists of resources, as much less likely to result in actual practice changes than dynamic strategies that include observations of teacher modeling, small-group discussions, and opportunities to practice targeted skills.
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