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

Abstract

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‐visiting quality at scale with the home visit rating scales and a supervisor checklist in Peru

“…Each item can take four possible ratings: 1 ( needs training or support ), 3 ( adequate ), 5 ( good ), and 7 ( excellent ); scale ratings are estimated from the item ratings (on a 7‐point scale) and can be combined to create domain scores. The instrument has been shown to be reliable using video observations of a sample of 65 families in two Early Head Start home‐visiting programs (for instrument reliability and associations with parenting and child development outcomes, see Roggman et al., ). The HOVRS was translated to Spanish, and the phrasing of some items was marginally modified to facilitate comprehension in the study context.…”

Examining program quality in early childhood home visiting: From infrastructure to relationships

“…The authors of the HOVRS designed the measure for practitioners and supervisors to support professional development of home‐visiting practices aiming to help parents support their children's development (see Roggman et al., this issue). It emphasizes a developmental parenting approach that respects family strengths and culture.…”

“…Each indicator has four anchor points (1 = needs support , 3 = adequate , 5 = good , 7 = excellent ). The authors report good scale and interreporter reliability across the Home Visitor Practices Quality Scales and good predictive validity (Roggman, et al., this issue). Coders for the Monitoring Project were trained to reliability by one of the authors of the HOVRS, who has provided ongoing consultation as needed.…”

“…We will demonstrate how separate strands of evidence are used to create feedback both at the program and at the state (network) levels to aid in the process of technical assistance and quality improvement. As an example, we will examine how information collected from program staff about their work in the context of guided interviewing does and does not relate to measurement of actual home‐visitor behavior, as captured by the Home Visit Rating Scales (HOVRS; Roggman et al., this issue). This experience has forced us to grapple with issues of how to measure quality, how to use and summarize complex data into coherent perspectives, and how to feed this information back to the program and other stakeholders in a way that is useful to improve program services.…”

“…In addition, the study recruited home visitors at each site to provide single video recordings of home visits on one or two families (called case studies ), and these visits were scored using the HOVRS (see Roggman et al., this issue; the version used for the current study was the HOVRS‐A+v2, currently referred to as the HOVRS‐3). After each site visit, programs provided feedback on their experience in the site visit.…”