Parent-child relationships: are health visitors’ judgements reliable?

In the context that the quality of the parent-child relationship is a strong predictor of outcomes for children, and that its assessment is a key element of the work of health visitors, this paper describes an exploratory study, undertaken in Glasgow West Community Healthcare Partnership, of assessments by health visitors of video clips involving parent-child interactions, before and after a brief training in observational assessment, with the aim of assessing the extent to which health visitors agreed about whether parent-child relationships were or were not problematic, and whether training would increase identification of problems in parent-child interactions. The results showed that participants generally demonstrated reasonable levels of agreement, except when high frequencies of both positive and negative parenting behaviours were seen in the same video, and that brief training on assessing parent-child relationships may increase the tendency of health visitors to identify problems but that more research is required into how this might be done most effectively.