1 Implementing Large-Scale Studies of Children Using Clinical Assessments

Research on children comes in many guises. A researcher can gain some understanding of how child development is influenced by the environment—such as parental depression or experiences in day care—by collecting data from caregivers. Substantially more information may be gained by administering developmental assessments directly to the child. However, adding an assessment to a research project can be difficult and costly when the child is an infant, toddler, or preschooler. Only a small number of tools are available for the direct assessment of cognitive and motor development in infants and toddlers. As a result, researchers often limit their choices of outcome measures or restrict themselves to studies using small samples because they are concerned that they will not be able to reliably administer complex assessments to large numbers of children. While this is a valid concern, the authors of this paper encourage researchers to think creatively in considering how to train a broad range of field data collectors to reliably administer such complex developmental assessments for large-scale studies so that we can enhance our understanding of factors influencing children’s early development. This paper highlights three case studies in adapting a complex child development scale, the Bayley Scales of Infant Development-II (BSID-II), for large-scale research projects. We first present the experience of developing a training plan for the Early Head Start Researc