Human and Social Development

THE AFRICAN EARLY CHILD DEVELOPMENT MEASURES RESOURCE

Procedure

Overview

A multistage procedure was used to identify and organise relevant literature for the resource. The main goal was to source information about measures that focus on the psychosocial development of young children (0 - 9) in Africa. In this respect the project was broken down into four main stages.

The first involved compiling a target list of measures to be included in the resource. The second stage involved searching relevant literature sources to obtain two levels of information about these measures:

1. General information about the nature and administration of the measure (purpose, scores, population) as well psychometric features of the measures (standardisation, reliability and validity).
2. African Studies that have undertaken either psychometric investigation of the measure in an African context (provided local norms, conducted validation studies) or have used the measure in particular research contexts (eg, studies of the effects of malnutrition among Tanzanian children).

The third stage involved choosing specific fields within each of the information levels and entering relevant information into these fields.

The fourth stage involved developing a system to organise the measures by reference to their use in an African context, for example, language translations, normed populations, the number of validation and research studies conducted in Africa.
 
Since work on the resource is ongoing, we have documented the various stages of the project. This includes our search strategy as well as the various sources of information utilised for each level of information. Where we feel the resource is limited, we have included recommendations for future work. 

Our search strategy and sources of information

Target list 

To compile a target list of measures for inclusion in the resource we corresponded with various child development professionals, university test librarians and test distributors throughout Africa. Our primary goal was to determine which measures of psychosocial development are currently being used, adapted or developed in an African context for children aged 0 to 9 years. In addition we sought to include a limited number of measures focused on the care-giving environment. Once an extensive list of measures was compiled a cut-off rule was applied, to ensure that each measure contained a reasonable ‘depth' of information. In addition, since the resource was intended mainly to assist researchers, achievement tests representing assessments of acquired knowledge across school subject content areas (apart from Reading, Writing and Arithmetic) were excluded. In addition many achievement tests such as those used in school assessments are not publicly available.

While 105 measures where identified for inclusion in the resource, for the most part they were derived from South African sources. Future work would therefore benefit from further correspondence with universities and researchers throughout Africa to determine additional child development measures to be included in the resource.

The terms M2 and M2 in the headings below are used as a shorthand when each measure is described.

General information (M2)

In order to collect general information about the various measures we relied on author correspondence (for unpublished tests), test distributor catalogues, online publisher information and for a limited number of measures, actual test materials and manuals. While we were able to acquire sufficient general information for measures, the extent of freely available information provided by various test distributors and publishers varied and typically did not include example items. Future work would therefore benefit from access to the actual test material and manual. In addition the resource could be considerably improved by the inclusion of unpublished tests and by test author correspondence structured around the ‘fields' developed in the resource.

Since the focus of the present resource is with the use of measures in an African context, we did not attempt to provide detailed information about the psychometric properties of the instruments or reviews thereof as established outside of Africa.

Such information is already available through a number of print and electronic sources, such as the test-related bibliographies published by the Buros Institute, for example, Tests in Print (TIP) and The Mental Measurements Yearbook (MMY), and online test reviews provided by various psychological associations throughout Europe, such as The British Psychological Association.

Nevertheless international opinion on the psychometric properties of various measures is an important point of departure. In this respect we aimed to include psychometric review references for each measure, as well as informative comments about the validity and reliability of the measures as discussed in international reviews. In many cases this involved direct quotation from written reviewers published in the Mental Measurements Yearbooks or in other test related bibliographies. The sources for such quotations are cited as psychometric review references, although standard referencing conventions have been omitted to ease presentation.  We encourage readers to source the reviews cited. Again our intention in providing this level of information in the ECD resource, was to provide specific operational information about the measures, as well as an indication of the psychometric properties of the measures as established outside Africa.

African studies (M3)

A three-step approach was used to source African psychometric references and empirical studies.

Firstly, a target list of ‘key' child development specialists working in Africa was drawn up, and relevant published research (after 1985) by these authors was sourced and entered into the database. Secondly, electronic database and library searches of African journals, reports and unpublished dissertations and theses were conducted, to identify relevant studies. Thirdly, a database search of international journals was carried out using the names of indexed measures as keywords in order to source African research published abroad.

In future work, the resource would benefit from greater inclusion of information from African dissertations and theses, since translations and adaptations of measures have often been carried out in this manner. In addition, although not frequently accessible, information from commissioned reports would greatly add to the ‘depth' of information in the resource, as would the inclusion of studies and reports published in languages other than English.

The "Discussion" sidebar in this resource enables continuous updating of the document over time. This will be done as regularly as possible by the HSRC but at least bi-annually."