The use of the Internet in collecting CDI data – an example from Norway

Abstract

This article presents the methodology used in a population-based study of early communicative development in Norwegian children using an adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates communicative development inventories (CDI), comprising approximately 6500 children aged between 0.8 and 3.0. To our knowledge, this is the first CDI study collecting data via the Internet. After a short description of the procedures used in adapting the CDI to Norwegian and the selection of participants, we discuss the advantages and potential pitfalls of using web-based forms as a method of data collection. We found that use of web-based forms was far less time-consuming, and therefore also far less expensive than the traditional paper-based forms. The risk of coding errors was virtually eliminated with this method. We conclude that in a society with high access to the Internet, this is a method well worth pursuing.

Infant communicative development assessed with the European Portuguese MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventories short forms

“…Concurrent validity was determined by assessing the relation between the CDI scores and child performance in spontaneous speech samples (along the lines of Kristoffersen et al, 2012). A comparison was made between the lexical items included in a lexicon based on spontaneously produced child speech (PLEX5 - Frota et al, 2012), and the words included in the EP-CDI SFs.…”

Norwegian Words: A lexical database for clinicians and researchers

“…This means that either parents over-report on their children's lexical development, or adults underestimate their own vocabulary in retrospect. The latter seems most likely, as the Norwegian CDI results have been found to be valid and reliable (Kristoffersen et al, 2013;Simonsen et al, 2014). 6 For the survey on AoA as well as for the survey on imageability, information was sent to The Norwegian Social Science Data Services, and the relevant permits were obtained.…”

The Norwegian Communicative Development Inventories: Reliability, main developmental trends and gender differences

“…Following the parents' suggestions, a few words (for example pc) were added and some were removed; but, in all, this version of the CDI was only slightly revised. Before constructing the web-based forms used in the present study, however, we revised the forms again, this time aiming to bring the Norwegian adaptation as close as possible to the Danish adaptation, in order to facilitate cross-linguistic comparison between two closely related languages with comparable grammatical systems but with quite different phonologies (see Kristoffersen et al (2013) for details).…”