Preliminary psychometric evidence of the Greek adaptation to the EC-CC HOME scale for use in institutional environments

Although lacking in official figures, latest reports from NGOs highlight that Greece has over85 institutional settings that house more than 2,500 children, excluding unaccompanied minors entering thesystem continuously for the past few years. Given the impact that institutional care has been found to have onpsychological and cognitive outcomes, the authors make the case for the adaptation of Early Childhood ChildCare HOME (EC-CC-HOME) a world-renowned instrument that assesses children’s child-care environment. Inthis instance, we have adapted the child-care version of HOME to assess the physical and organisations aspectsof the residential environment, following the permission and through collaboration with the developer. Thisbrief report presents some of the preliminary evidence of the first step undertaken towards the full adaptationof EC-CC-HOME in Greek and for use in institutional environments; participants were 29 children residingin such environments. Preliminary results on the psychometric characteristics of the measure, especially inrelation to the learning aspect of the environment presented here, hold promise. This is an especially importantfirst indication of how the measure works in view of the imminent adaptation of the scale to be used withinstitutional environments where children can benefit greatly from such a measure. Issues in relation to goodpractices in providing evidence for the psychometric characteristics of measures are briefly discussed as part ofthis investigation.