1. Objectifs

Intentions :
«This chapter focuses on the important insights regarding the nature of early mother-infant interaction and its assessment that can be drawn from this struggle to develop and effective assessment instrument.» (p. 259)

2. Méthode

Échantillon/Matériau :
Les auteurs utilisent des données documentaires diverses.

Type de traitement des données :
Réflexion critique

3. Résumé

«We hope that in this chapter, we have established that the Maternal Behaviour Q-sort [MBQS] has the potential to be used efficiently and effectively in clinical assessment and intervention. The MBQS now has a strong foundation in the research literature, establishing its validity as a meaningful measure of the quality of mother-infant interaction. As we have discussed, it diminishes the likelihood of misrepresentations of maternal sensitivity that can be associated with more traditional rating scale-based assessments. Moreover, the MBQS has been shown to maintain its validity under a range of circumstances, across a range of ages from infancy to early childhood, and involving both real-time observations and video-records, which makes it especially relevant to the constraints and demands of clinical application where the controls possible in a research environment are often not available. We end this overview of the challenges of assessing the quality of maternal interaction or maternal sensitivity with considerations that we feel are essential to anyone planning to make such assessments in a clinical setting.» (p. 276)