Multiple Measures; Multiple Sources Posted on March 14, 2006 J. Steven Reznick (bio) discusses the need for multiple sources of data from infants.

For better or worse, when it comes to measurement, I am a total skeptic. I just have a hard time accepting that many of the measures that are commonly accepted in the field do what they are supposed to do. I feel like that my professional legacy... If what I leave is a few better measures, I will be proud.

One other thing to consider in measurement. Multiple measurement of infants, but also multiple sources of data. And what we try to balance is primarily watching babies do things, setting them in situations where because the baby looks more to this side than to that side, we can infer whatever. But also global assessments done by the experimenter are important at times. An experimenter can say, "I administered this procedure, but the child, the infant, just wasn't there. She didn't get it." It's important to know that because when you go back to the computer and you're analyzing data, if the numbers don't reflect what you thought you had the baby doing, they're useless. So the experimenter input

And then the third source is parent report, and I have in my career explored the domain of parent report and found where it is good, where it's not so good, and how it can be affected. Parents are very good observers of child language. What the child is saying, the infant is saying, is something really salient to a parent, so they keep track of the words. The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories have been very successful because they tap that.

On the other hand, we also did some work trying to get parent report on what babies can do deliberately or intentionally, parent report of intentionality. I have several measures of that, and the bottom line is those measures have almost nothing to do with babies except in extreme circumstances; they're almost always about the parent, and the variance can be accounted for by culture, mental health, a lot of other factors as to why parents see things a certain way. So you have to be wise in knowing what parents can know and what they don't know as well.

And the bottom line there is measurement in infants is not easy, and if you find conclusions that are based on easy things, I think it's good to be skeptical.

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