Comparing Rater Reliability of Familiar Practitioners to Blinded Coders

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The purpose of this study is to determine the external validity of a scale for emotional connection between children and their parents through a retrospective longitudinal study. The Welch Emotional Connection Scale (WECS) is a screen that allows healthcare providers to rate the emotional connection...

The purpose of this study is to determine the external validity of a scale for emotional connection between children and their parents through a retrospective longitudinal study. The Welch Emotional Connection Scale (WECS) is a screen that allows healthcare providers to rate the emotional connection of a mother-child relationship in just a few minutes of observed interaction, and shows preliminary predictive properties when performed in the first year of the child's life. Administration of the WECS involves watching interactions of a child sitting face-to-face on a parent's lap, and scores the interaction on sliding scales in 4 domains. During the WECS development, the Nurture Science Program of Columbia University Medical Center created and coded hours of parent-child interaction videos. This video data set will be used to determine how clinical WECS scores, where raters are familiar with mother-child dyads over time, compare to research WECS scores, where rate-rs are blinded to each case. The WECS scores of clinical coders, who are exposed to the same case at different time points, will be compared to blinded coders who see cases at just one time point. To simulate implementation of the WECS in a clinical setting, two primary care nurse practitioner (PNP) students who are trained in rating emotional connection will view videos to rate the emotional connection of mother-child dyads collected at different time points. To recreate WECS used in a research setting, blinded coders trained in rating emotional connection will rate the emotional connection of the same video data set. Each blinded coder will only view a dyad once, to not be influenced by previous time points of the same subject. The inter-rater reliability of the blinded and clinical coders will be determined. The comparison of inter-rater reliability scores between clinical and blinded coders is the main outcome of this study.

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