ABSTRACT
For over 20 years, our professional lives centered around studies of families. Our investigations of family life led us to develop a number of measures of parenting, the most well-known being the Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment (HOME) inventory (Bradley, 1994; Caldwell & Bradley, 1984). More recently, we designed Parental Investment in Children (Bradley, Whiteside-Mansell, Caldwell, & Brisby, 1997), a measure of parents’ attachment to their children. We visited hundreds of homes, and were bombarded with questions regarding measurement of the home environment. Two lasting impressions emerged from this experience: the diversity of family life and corresponding challenge of trying to understand its role in children’s development.
