Assessing Parent Perceptions of the Home Environment and Children's Social Behavior to Inform School Interventions

Background and Purpose: Theoretical perspectives informing school social work research, such as developmental psychopathology, risk and resilience, ecological theory, and developmental contextualism, suggest that students' social and academic behaviors in schools are influenced by their experiences in the social environment. However, assessing home environments and behavior presents a logistical challenge for school social workers. The Elementary School Success Profile (ESSP) is an assessment designed to provide school staff with social environmental information to guide intervention efforts and promote school success for elementary school students. The ESSP gathers survey information from children, teachers, and families about the children's home and school environments. The purpose of the current study was to test the factor structure and scale quality of family-report items assessing the home environment and child behavior at home.

Methods: The sample was comprised of caregivers of 692 third through fifth grade students attending 13 low-performing schools in four school districts in a south-eastern state. Each school was participating in one of four ESSP projects during the 2008-2009 school year. The schools were diverse in terms of urbanicity/rurality, racial/ethnic composition, community resources, and geographic location in the state. Data were collected via the online ESSP for Families or a hard copy of the survey. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was conducted on the data using Mplus software. Mplus was selected because the data were both ordinal and non-normally distributed. Two competing models were fit to the data using a jigsaw piecewise technique, and models were evaluated according to fit indices and theoretical meaning. The final model was tested on both calibration and validation samples drawn from the original dataset.

Results: Good fit was obtained using a first-order model representing nine factors: Home Educational Environment, Home Learning Activities, Child Is a Good Playmate, Child Interacts Peacefully, Child Uses Self-Control, Warmth & Encouragement, Family Who Care, Positive Sibling Relationships, and Patient Parenting. The fit of the model to the data provided evidence of the quality of the Home Environment and Home Social Behavior scales of the ESSP for Families and confirmed its hypothesized structure. As a result, 19 items were deleted from the survey instrument to increase its parsimony and feasibility while maintaining internal scale reliability. The results of the CFA contribute to evidence of the validity of data collected from family members about aspects of the home environment and children's behavior outside of school.

Conclusions and Implications: Because it can be challenging to collect data from parents on the home environment, succinct yet reliable scale items are important to the efforts of school staff to inform evidence based school interventions. The positive findings on the quality of the ESSP for Families lend support to the overall quality of the ESSP as a tool to help school staff better understand students and how to help them succeed. The authors will discuss how the ESSP can be implemented in schools, how data can help social workers learn about children and families in their schools, and how data can be used to inform effective school interventions.