Erin Albrecht

Validity of the Participation and Environment Measure for Children and Youth (PEM-CY) for Health Impact Assessment (HIA) in sustainable development projects

BACKGROUND Participation in home, school, and community activities is an important indicator of child health and well-being. Evaluating environmental influences on childrens participation can inform efforts to develop sustainable built environments, but few validated measures exist. OBJECTIVE To examine the concurrent validity and utility of the Participation and Environment Measure for Children and Youth (PEM-CY) for Health Impact Assessment in non-urban sustainable development projects affecting children with disabilities. METHODS Eighty-nine parents of children and youth with disabilities who identified as residing in a small town or rural community were sampled. Sixty-six caregivers completed the PEM-CY online, and 23 caregivers completed the PEM-CY and CHIEF-CP paper forms. Spearman correlational analyses were conducted to establish the concurrent validity of the PEM-CY environment sections against the CHIEF-CP. Group comparisons by childs age, number of functional limitations, and annual household income were used to examine differences in summary and item-level responses on the PEM-CY community section. RESULTS Moderate to strong associations were found between CHIEF-CP Total Product and Magnitude Scores and all PEM-CY Environment Summary Scores. CHIEF-CP Physical/Structural and Policies Subscale Scores were most consistently associated with PEM-CY Environment Summary Scores. Group differences by household income were found for participation frequency and number of supports, including perceived availability and adequacy of money and information about programs and services, even when controlling childs age and number of functional limitations. CONCLUSION Study results lend support to the use of the PEM-CY in HIA to reliably assess for environmental impact on childrens participation. Implications for using the PEM-CY to inform decision-making in non-urban sustainable development projects affecting families of children and youth with disabilities are discussed.

Environmental impact on young children's participation in home-based activities

To test the effect of child, family, and environmental factors on young childrens participation in home‐based activities.

Assessing Biobehavioural Self‐Regulation and Coregulation in Early Childhood: The Parent‐Child Challenge Task

Researchers have argued for more dynamic and contextually relevant measures of regulatory processes in interpersonal interactions. In response, we introduce and examine the effectiveness of a new task, the Parent-Child Challenge Task, designed to assess the self-regulation and coregulation of affect, goal-directed behavior, and physiology in parents and their preschoolers in response to an experimental perturbation. Concurrent and predictive validity was examined via relations with childrens externalizing behaviors. Mothers used only their words to guide their 3-year-old children to complete increasingly difficult puzzles in order to win a prize (N = 96). A challenge condition was initiated mid-way through the task with a newly introduced time limit. The challenge produced decreases in parental teaching and dyadic behavioral variability and increases in child negative affect and dyadic affective variability, measured by dynamic systems-based methods. Children rated lower on externalizing showed respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) suppression in response to challenge, whereas those rated higher on externalizing showed RSA augmentation. Additionally, select task changes in affect, behavior, and physiology predicted teacher-rated externalizing behaviors four months later. Findings indicate the Parent-Child Challenge Task was effective in producing regulatory changes and suggest its utility in assessing biobehavioral self-regulation and coregulation in parents and their preschoolers.

Determinants of change in home participation among critically ill children

To estimate changes in home participation among critically ill children in the first 6 months after discharge from a pediatric intensive care unit (PICU), and to explore the effect of child, service, and environmental factors on change in home participation.

Can We Fix This? Parent–Child Repair Processes and Preschoolers' Regulatory Skills

The repair of difficult parent-child interactions is a marker of healthy functioning in infancy, but less is known about repair processes during early childhood. We used dynamic systems methods to investigate dyadic repair in mothers and their 3-year-old children (N = 96) and its prediction of childrens emotion regulation and behavior problems at a four-month follow-up. Mothers and children completed free play and challenging puzzle tasks. Repair was operationalized as the conditional probability of moving into a dyadic adaptive behavior region after individual or dyadic maladaptive behavior (e.g., child noncompliance, parental criticism). Overall, dyads repaired approximately half their maladaptive behaviors. A greater likelihood of repair during the puzzle task predicted better child emotion regulation and fewer behavior problems in preschool. Results suggest dyadic repair is an important process in early childhood and provide further evidence for the connection between parent-child coregulation and childrens developing regulatory capacities. Implications for family-based interventions are discussed.