For the Global Health Minor immersion experience, I spent Winter Term volunteering with Baby University, a nonprofit attempting to close the education gap in South Toledo by equipping parents of children ages 0-5 for the vital role they play in their child’s development and early education. Baby U carries out this mission via free, ten-week parenting programs. After my immersion, I was curious if Baby U’s early intervention was successfully changing parental attitudes. I hypothesized that Baby U would improve parental attitudes as quantified by the Adult Adolescent Parenting Inventory (AAPI). This is a 40-question survey administered in two forms at the beginning (Form A) and end (Form B) of Baby U’s program. To test my hypothesis, I performed paired t-tests and a cross-tab analysis on 412 parents’ AAPI-2 paired forms collected from 2011-2017. This allowed for the determination of both a statistically significant and practically significant difference between Form A and B scores. When looking at an all-year aggregate of the data, Form B scores appeared to be both significantly and practically improved over Form A scores. However, upon disaggregation of the data, there were no consistent patterns or trends from year to year. From this, strong conclusions could not be drawn about the effects of Baby U on parental attitudes. A major contributor to the inconsistency of results could be the potential lack of equivalency between Form A and B. Future psychometric testing needs to be performed on the AAPI to determine equivalency of Form A and B. By the end of May, I will be submitting a program report to Baby University. My major recommendation will be that they administer either Form A or Form B as both a pretest and posttest until equivalency of the two forms can be supported by psychometric testing.
Author: Claire Stoll
Advisors: Dr. Beth Miller, Department of Kinesiology and Health
Dr. Paul Flaspohler, Department of Psychology
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