Parenting at Home: A Special Double Issue of Parenting: Science and Practice

The Home Observation for Measurement of the Environmental (HOME) Inventory is a scale designed to assess the emotional support and cognitive stimulation children receive through their home environment, planned events, and family surroundings. This special double issue reports on the development of conceptually meaningful subscales that assess specific domains of the home environment for the three youngest age versions of the HOME Inventory (infants/toddlers, early childhood, and middle childhood) , addresses the problems inherent in items relying on caregiver self-report, and assesses the predictive validity of the newly developed subscales. The issue draws data from six large, national data sets and assesses the predictive validity of the proposed subscales by correlating them with selected cognitive and behavioral outcomes in each dataset, concluding with commentaries on the conceptual subscale work by two leading experts on the HOME.