Impact of an early childhood intervention on the home environment, and subsequent effects on child cognitive and emotional development: A secondary analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The objective of this study was to use secondary data from the Preparing for Life (PFL) trial to test (1) the impact of a prenatal-to-age-five intervention targeting women from a disadvantaged Irish community on the quality of the home environment; (2) whether any identified changes in the home environment explain the positive effects of the PFL program on children's cognitive and emotional development at school entry which have been identified in previous reports of the PFL trial (ES = .72 and .50, respectively). Pregnant women were randomized into a treatment (home visits, baby massage, and parenting program, n = 115) or control (n = 118) group (trial registration: ISRCTN04631728). The home environment was assessed at 6 months, 1½, and 3 years using the Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment (responsiveness, acceptance, organization, learning material, involvement, variety). Cognitive skills were assessed at 5 years using the British Ability Scales. Emotional problems were teacher-reported at 5 years using the Short Early Development Inventory. Latent growth modeling was used to model changes in the home environment, and mediation analyses to test whether those changes explained children outcomes. Compared to controls, treatment children were exposed to more stimulating environments in terms of learning material (B = -1.62, p = 0.036) and environmental variety (B = -1.58, p = 0.009) at 6 months, but these differences faded at 3 years. Treatment families were also more likely to accept suboptimal child behaviors without using punishment (acceptance score, B = 1.49, p = 0.048) and were more organized at 3 years (B = 1.08, p = 0.033). None of the changes mediated children's outcomes. In conclusion, we found that the program positively impacted different home environment dimensions, but these changes did not account for improvements in children's outcomes. Exploratory analyses suggest that the impact of improvements in the home environment on child outcomes may be limited to specific groups of children. Limitations of the study include the potential lack of generalizability to other populations, the inability to assess the individual treatment components, and sample size restrictions which precluded a moderated mediation analysis.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".