engleski

INTRODUCING PARENTAL SCREENING TOOL IN CROATIA

Research subject: The need to introduce research findings about the importance of prenatal and early childhood experiences into practice certainly presents great challenge for professionals, communities and national policy. Creating a child’s needs meeting environment represents the best form of their rights respect for which early screening, diagnostics and adequate intervention plays crucial role. In Croatia, however there still is no standardized screening instrument widely applied although data suggests that the use of developmental surveillance as pediatricians’ common method alone leads to a low detection rate, missing up to 45 percent of children who might benefit from early intervention (Aylward, 2009). Method: The paper is aimed to present and critical evaluate the Croatia experience in introducing parental screening tools whiten early childhood intervention. Results: A year ago we started to prepare teams of experts for trial locally conducted studies, eventually aiming to conduct national standardization study using ASQ 3 (Squires, Bricker, 2009). This is 19 months’ intervals screening questionnaires aimed for parents to complete ; each of the intervals with 30 items in five domains: Communication, Gross Motor, Fine Motor, Problem Solving, and Personal Social). The aim of the presented part of the study is to show the psychometric properties of the screening tool (internal consistency of the eightquestionnaires22 -, 30-. 33-, 36-, 42-, 48-, 54 and 60 month intervals), with Cronbach’s alphas varied between .63 and .86. But we were also looking for answers to several study questions in order to determine to what extent the preschool teachers (N=21) were able to screen the children (N=97), how they perceive the importance of its use, and what were their experiences in communicating with parents. Conclusion: The parental feedback given suggests there are certain concerns about time, cost and social context issues influencing the optimal understanding of the importance of early screening.

importance of early screening, ASQ 3 - parent screening tool

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