Pilot study of the home observation for measurement of the environment for Infant/toddlers (IT-HOME) in Thailand

An extensive literature documents the importance of the home environment for child development. However, only one previous study in 2003 reported the use of the Infant/Toddler HOME (IT-HOME) with rural children in Thailand. The study of the IT-HOME with extended socioeconomic groups would benefit researchers to assess child home environment systematically and relevantly for the Thai culture. In this study, psychologists administered the Thai-translated IT-HOME to a convenience sample of 89 dyads of caregivers and children, 12–35 months, from Urban/High SES (N = 30), Urban/Low SES (N = 30), and Rural/Low SES (N = 29) groups in Thailand. The internal consistency of the overall Thai-translated IT-HOME was.82. The high percent “yes” response of each item across all groups showed that all items were relevant to Thai families and culture. Among the Thai samples, the IT-HOME score of Urban/High was significantly higher than both Urban/Low and Rural/ Low. Interestingly, Rural/Low had significantly higher scores than Urban/ Low in the total score and some content domains. The overall results for the Thai participants were similar to a 1997-US sample from Washington State, but were significantly higher than the 1972-US normative data and previous 2003-rural data from northeastern Thailand. Our study suggests that the Thai-translated IT-HOME is culturally appropriate for Thai children and families. Therefore, the use of the Thai-translated IT-HOME is recommended for the standard assessment of overall quality of home environment for children in Thailand.