Individual differences in clinical judgments of mother-child interaction

The investigation explored three research questions related to the clinical evaluation of mother-child interaction: (1) Do professionals use a common set of perceptual dimensions to discriminate among mother-child interaction; (2) what variables related to the dimensions do professionals use; and (3) does professional background influence the discrimination process?;A multidimensional scaling analysis (MDS) was employed to explore the questions. Eighty-six professional subjects participated in the investigation. They represented four professions which conduct evaluations on mother-child interaction: speech-language pathologists, nurses, social workers, and early childhood special educators. The investigator conducted parallel analyses including forty-three subjects in each with an almost equal distribution of professional groups.;Stimuli for the professional judgments were eight one-minute samples of video-taped mother-child interactions. The twelve-month old children had been health-impaired at birth and were participating in an early intervention research project with their families. Two different mother-child dyads represented each level of child development (high or low) paired with each mother interaction style (non-directive or directive).;Two groups of professional subjects made two clinical judgments; each group rated different video samples of the same mother-child pairs. The first clinical judgment task involved a series of paired comparisons among all possible pairs of the dyadic stimuli (28). The second clinical judgment task involved applying a thirteen-item mother-child interaction rating scale to each dyadic stimulus.;A comparison of the data generated by the parallel MDS analyses indicated two trends in professional evaluation of mother-child interaction. First, a culturally related dimension accounted for the majority of the variance across the parallel analyses. This dimension indicated that professional generally perceived dyads in which the mother were young, poor, and uneducated as different from the others. Second, a lack of any other consistent trend in the data across the analyses indicated that professional evaluation of mother-child interaction beyond the culturally related dimension is highly idiosyncratic. These trends in the data appear unrelated to membership in a profession. The data provide support for professional training in a system designed to objectively evaluate mother-child interaction.