Asking the Experts: Developing and Validating Parental Diaries to Assess Children’s Minor Injuries

Abstract

The methodological issues involved in parental reporting of events in children’s everyday lives are discussed with reference to the development and validation of an incident diary, collecting concurrent data on minor injuries in a community study of children under eight years old. Eighty-two mothers participated in a comparison over nine days of daily tele-phone interviews and structured incident diaries. Telephone methods resulted in more missing data, and participants in both groups expressed a preference for the diary method. This diary was then validated on a sample of 56 preschool and school-aged children by comparing injury recording by a research health visitor with that of their mothers. Each failed to report some injuries, but there was good agreement overall, and in descriptive data on injuries reported by both. Parental diaries have the potential to provide rich data, of acceptable validity, on minor events in everyday life.

Acknowledgements

Above all, we are grateful to the parents and children who participated in the research. Particular thanks are also due to the team that conducted fieldwork, including the research health visitor: Sue Hall, Caroline Morse, Maggie Reid and Cheryl Pitt. The research was funded by the Department of Health for England and Wales; the views expressed here are those of the authors alone.