Developing new scales for assessing parents’ aural and oral rehabilitation skills to interact with children with hearing loss

Abstract

Objective

Scales for evaluating the teaching and behavioural skills of parents enrolled in aural and oral rehabilitation programs for children with hearing loss are lacking. This study developed and validated scales for assessing parental teaching and behavioural skills of those parents for use in guiding their child to develop language and communication skills.

Design

Scales were constructed and evaluated using exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. The performance of parents in teaching and behavioural skills was also explored.

Study sample

The teaching and behavioural skills of 344 parents (179 for scale development and 165 for validation) were rated by their intervention therapists using parental teaching skill (PTS) and parental behavioural skill (PBS) scales.

Results

Good reliability and model fit (validity) were observed for both scales, which ultimately included 13 and 10 items, respectively. Maternal educational level was a significant indicator of their performance ratings.

Conclusions

The PTS and PBS scales were validated and can be used by early intervention professionals to evaluate the relative interaction and behavioural skills of parents of children with hearing loss, and enrolled in listening and spoken language intervention programs.

Keywords:

• Early intervention
• hearing loss
• teaching skill
• behavioural skill
• parent-child interaction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Children’s Hearing Foundation under Grant number CHF-2014-004-A-003-b.