Psychological dimensions of the infant's physical environment

Relation of maternal personality to perceptions of environmental chaos in the home

“…Environmental chaos was measured using the Confusion Hubbub and Order Scale (CHAOS, Matheny et al, 1995), nine physical environment codes from the Purdue Home Stimulation Inventory (PHSI, Wachs et al, 1979) and two disorganization codes from the Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment scale (HOME, Caldwell & Bradley, 1984). CHAOS was used as the parent perception measurement while PHSI physical codes and HOME disorganization codes were derived from direct assessments in the home.…”

“…Initially, assessments of home chaos were based on direct observational measurements of noise, crowding or clutter in the home (Booth & Edwards, 1976;Bradley, 1999;Cohen, Evans, Krantz, & Stokols, 1980;Wachs, Francis, & McQuiston, 1979). While direct assessments have the advantage of objectively recording specific dimensions of home chaos in real time they are costly in terms of effort since they require observations (ideally repeated observations) to directly record existing conditions.…”

Nature of relations between the physical and social microenvironment of the two‐year‐old child

“…These included the number of times the caregiver spontaneously vocalized or named objects for the child, the degree and nature of caregiver responsivity to the child's vocalization or distress, the number of times the caregiver gave, showed or demonstrated objects to the child, the amount and nature of caregiver reactivity to the child's attempts to obtain caregiver reaction, the level of caregiver investment and the caregiver's characteristic affect. Previous research has demonstrated high levels of cross-time stability and predictive validity for the various PHSI codes used in this project (Wachs et al, 1979(Wachs et al, , 1984. Coders were trained to an initial interrater reliability of 0.85 for all PHSI codes.…”

Criteria for the Assessment of Organism-Environment Correlation in Human Developmental Studies

“…Further, Meredith's (1973) approach suffers from the assumption that the number of environmental variables must be less than the number of criterion variables. Considering the demonstrated complexity of the physical (Wachs et al, 1978) and social environment (Roff, 1949;Stern et al, 1969), this approach seems to be open to serious question. Morton and his colleagues have developed several sophisticated models of family resemblance which include provision for the assessment of organism-environment correlation effects.…”

“…As a result, there has been an increasing emphasis on the use of naturalistic, proximal measures of the individual's environment. As noted earlier, because of the complexity of the natural human environment (Stern et al, 1969;Roff, 1949;Wachs et al, 1978), naturalistic measurement of the child's environment must encompass a large number of potentially effective variables. However, even the use of naturalistic observation of multiple variables may lead to an over simplification of the environment if the time dimension is also not taken into account.…”