Thanks to families: how have we validated a tool to measure child development?

Understanding how children grow and develop during the first years of life is essential for families, healthcare professionals, and society as a whole. As parents, you observe your child’s abilities, behaviours, and progress every day. These everyday observations are especially valuable during early childhood, a period marked by very rapid development in areas such as movement, communication, learning, emotions, and social interaction. The aim of this study was to ensure that the Developmental Profile-3 (DP-3) you completed accurately reflects children’s development and can be confidently used with families in Spain.

The DP-3 is a parent-reported questionnaire based on caregivers’ knowledge of their child’s everyday behaviours and skills. Although the DP-3 has been used internationally and a Spanish version was already available, it had not yet been independently evaluated in a scientific study involving families from the general population in Spain. For this reason, we examined whether the Spanish DP-3 demonstrates adequate psychometric properties, including reliability, validity, and sensitivity to developmental change, when completed by families like yours.

Thanks to the BiSC families who kindly completed the DP-3 when their children were 28 months old, we were able to examine how DP-3 scores were associated with factors known to influence early development, such as age, family characteristics, parental education, and breastfeeding. For many children, parents had also completed the DP-3 at 8 months of age, which allowed us to study developmental change over time. In addition, for a subgroup of families, we compared parent-reported DP-3 results with the Bayley assessment conducted by Muriel when children were 18 months old. This comparison helped us evaluate whether parent reports align with more detailed, clinician-administered developmental assessments.

Our findings showed that the Spanish version of the DP-3 is a reliable and valid measure of early childhood development. The questionnaire demonstrated good internal consistency and measured developmental domains in a stable and coherent manner. DP-3 scores increased as expected with children’s age, indicating strong developmental validity and showing that parents’ responses provided a realistic and accurate picture of their children’s abilities. Moreover, DP-3 results were meaningfully associated with specialist-administered assessment scores, supporting the conclusion that parent-reported information reflects children’s real developmental skills.

We also found that the DP-3 is sensitive to developmental change over time. When completed at different ages, it clearly captured the substantial developmental progress that naturally occurs during early childhood. At the same time, it was able to detect more subtle differences between children, such as neurodevelopmental advantages associated with breastfeeding. Although the DP-3 is not a diagnostic tool, it plays an important role in identifying children who may benefit from closer follow-up or additional support.

Having a scientifically validated questionnaire has important implications at both the individual and population levels. For families, a reliable parent-reported tool such as the DP-3 allows children’s development to be monitored in an accessible and time-efficient way, including in settings such as schools or community services. Because it is based on parents’ observations, it can support early screening and help identify potential developmental difficulties at an early stage, when intervention may be most effective. At the public health level, population-based data provided by families contribute to a better understanding of child development and its determinants, helping to inform the design of child health programmes and the development of evidence-based public health policies.

Your participation in BiSC has contributed to ensure that this parent-reported tool is accurate, useful, and appropriate for the families who use them. We sincerely thank you for your time, involvement, and trust in contributing to research that aims to support the healthy development of all children.

 

This news item was written by Pol Jiménez Arenas, a predoctoral student.

You can read the paper here