Measuring early childhood development with The Early Human Capability Index (eHCI): a reliability and validity study in China

The importance of early childhood development (ECD) remains profound. The capacities established during early childhood lay the foundation for physical, emotional, and intellectual wellbeing in middle childhood, throughout adolescence and into adulthood, even with multi-generational effects [1]. The 2007 and 2011 Lancet Series on Child Development in Developing Countries spearheaded the review of evidence linking early childhood development with adult health and wellbeing. The 2016 series considered new scientific evidence for intervention, and proposed pathways for implementation of early childhood development at scale [2]. Studies from across the globe, such as the Jamaica project, Perry Preschool and Abecedarian program, have demonstrated that interventions significantly improved childhood development and even later adult outcomes in the studied settings [3‐5]. A meta-analysis, however, could not detect large effect sizes for the more recent and larger scale interventions [6], and the study suggests that ability of these measures for detecting effects could be one of the possible explanations. Tools for assessing early development used in small group trials, such as the Griffith and Bayley Scales of Infant Development, may not be effective in evaluating the impact of interventions implemented in large populations [7]. Traditionally, most measures of child development originate from the disciplines of pediatrics or developmental psychology, with focus on screening for developmental disability, which usually accounts for 10–15% of the whole population [8, 9]. However, there is evidence that more than 25% of children experience difficulties in learning, while they were not diagnosed as high-risk population by traditional clinical tools [10]. Moreover, many interventions implemented at scale are aimed at enhancing development, rather than identifying disabilities [11]. Therefore, a high-quality tool for measuring early childhood development is necessary to support the evaluation of early interventions. Such a tool would help to: evaluate children’s comprehensive traits, explore the protective factors that promote development and enhance child development at the population level [12].

Considering the limitations of clinical screening assessments, several tools have emerged to assess early childhood development at the population level. The Caregiver-Reported Early Development Instruments (CREDI) is developed for children under 3 years old and evaluates their early development [13]. As it was designed to function across a wide variety of culture, linguistic, and socioeconomic contexts, it has been promoted in 16 countries. The Early Childhood Development Index (ECDI) was launched by UNICEF as part of the Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys [14]. It contains 10 items covering the literacy–numeracy, learning, social–emotional, and physical development of children aged three and 4 years. The ECDI has been administrated in more than 60 low- and middle-income countries, and map the global early childhood development status.

Except for those tools developed for children in very early years, the concept of school readiness assessment is also considered to be an important indicator of early childhood development due to its effectiveness as a predictor of children’s future achievement [15]. If children are school ready, then they should be entering the education system with all the skills, capabilities, health and development to take advantage of the school learning environment and improve equity in achieving lifelong learning and full developmental potential among children [16]. The Early Development Instrument (EDI) is one of the few existing measurement that holistically evaluates the school readiness of children aged 3.5–6.5 years [17]. It was well-known as the main assessment tool in the Australian Early Development Census, which is implemented as a developmental census across the entire country once every 3 years [18]. However, the EDI is far from applied in international use, as it was originally designed for western culture. Cultural specificity is a key point in ECD concepts. Different aspects of culture (parenting practices, foods and social norms for example) can be both positive and negative for child development, however western developed instruments do not capture important aspects of child development in the Chinese culture and context. It is essential for any future population monitoring system of child development in China to be based on an instrument adapted to local culture and context. For example, the item of EDI “coming to school dressed appropriately” is intended to assessing children’s ability of organization, but most parents in poor countries and regions have no conditions to purchase “decent clothes” [16]. In view of these limitations, researchers are currently developing new scales that can better reflect child development across different cultures and contexts.

In 2013 the Early Human Capability Index (eHCI) was developed by Brinkman firstly in Tonga for impact evaluation of the school readiness component of the PERAL program [19]. The scale was designed to assess the comprehensive development of children aged 3–6 years at a population-level across diverse cultures. The original Tonga Early Human Capability Index contained 66 items in 9 domains including physical health, general verbal communication, cultural identity and spirituality, social and emotional well-being and skills, perseverance, approaches to learning, numeracy and concepts, formal literacy – reading and formal literacy – writing. It can be filled out by parents, teachers, social workers and other people familiar with the child. eHCI has been applied in other countries in the Pacific, South East Asia and Latin America. In 2014, the process of adapting the eHCI in China commenced. Through a process of discussions with experts in the fields of pediatric medicine and education, the instrument was adapted and revised item by item to conform to the cultural characteristics of China. Following this a series of pilots were conducted with particular attention paid to preventing any ceiling or floor effects for the Chinese population of children aged 3 through to 5 years of age. The aim of this paper is to validate the psychometrics of the Chinese version of the eHCI.

The mean age was 44.3 [SD: 3.6] months. Of those, 52.2% were boys and 47.8% were girls. Sample sizes and weighted demographic characteristics for Shanghai population were presented in Table 1.

The psychometric properties of eHCI were evaluated in a representative sample of children aged 3–4 years from all districts of Shanghai. Results of the present study suggest the eHCI is psychometrically sound for Chinese children.

In terms of reliability indicators, the α coefficient indicates good internal consistency sufficient for group comparison other than the domain of physical [26]. The physical subscale was designed to understand children’s disability, health status and behavior. The four items in the subscale are: “Is this child frequently sickly? “, “Does this child have good hygiene i.e. always wash their hands after toileting?”, “Does this child have any disabilities/special needs?”,“Does this child have a regular diet?”, are not strongly correlated with each other. Perhaps indicating that these physical factors act mainly as independent characteristics rather than as a scale of physical development. An ICC above 0.75 is considered as excellent [27]. The result of our reliability analysis suggested that eHCI had good internal consistency and temporal stability. However, the inter-rater agreement in the present analysis was more variable, with subscales related to Literacy Numeracy showing excellent consistency between scores rated by parents and teachers, and the others showing greater heterogeneity in responses. Since the items in Numeracy Concepts, Reading, and Writing are relatively objective indicators, it is reasonable that scores in those aspects were more consistent between parents and teachers. These results are consistent with the reported reliability of other measures of child development and the reasons for inconsistent are likely to be related to parent, teacher and child factors as well as context (for example; parental knowledge of child development, parent literacy levels, parental engagement in the school system, teacher qualifications and knowledge of development, teachers experience across different socioeconomic settings, child behavior being different in the school compared to home due to shyness or other factors). The paired t-test results suggested that teacher scored higher than parents for the same children. For example, the items in cultural spiritual are “Does this child talk politely?”, and “Is this child good to his or her parents?”. It may be because children act differently in kindergarten than at home. It also may be because parents expected too much of their children. We cannot draw a conclusion without deeper exploration of the reason behind the disagreement. In the future, when using the eHCI or other measures of child development it will be important to distinguish the raters prior to scores being compared across different populations.

The results of confirmatory factor analysis supported the underlying structure of the eHCI. The model fit demonstrated that the extracted factors from all items are capable of assessing the different developmental domains in Chinese children. All but five items have high factor loadings. Those five are reverse coded question: kick, bite or hit adults or other children; impatient; need constant reminding to finish something off; get easily distracted from a task; frequently sickly. Even though the factor loadings of the reverse coded items were lower than expected, it may be important to keep the items worded in a negative fashion. There is evidence to suggest that respondents get into a pattern of response and reversing the direction of a question requires deeper thinking, however others in survey methodology would recommend keeping all survey items in the same direction for simplicity and to reduce confusion [17, 28]. This may be something worth exploring further with future use of the eHCI.

The eHCI showed significant correlations with other metrics covering different domains of child development, such as Age & Stages Questionnaire (gross motor, fine motor, communication, problem-solving, social-personal), Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (psychosocial well-being), etc. However, those metrics are inclined to screen the individual with high-risk of development. The eHCI was designed to monitor the comprehensive abilities of children at population level. As such, we would not have expected correlations larger than what was found.

The discriminant validity of eHCI with demographic characteristics was also presented in the results. The eHCI scores of girls were significantly more than those of boys, consistent with the conclusion of other studies that girls mature earlier than boys [29]. The results also suggest that higher eHCI scores appeared in the groups with higher socioeconomic status, in keeping with prior research [30]. A large body of researches has found stunting are negatively related to early childhood development [31, 32], which is also certified using eHCI scale in this study. The significant association between eHCI scores and demographic characteristics verified that eHCI could detect the development heterogeneity of different populations.

This study has several limitations that deserve mention. First, although the eHCI was proved to be a feasible and comprehensive tool for identifying the developmental level of Chinese children, the overall sample was not representative of the national population, even though children from migrant workers from rural areas in Shanghai were included within this sample. Second, although the eHCI could be applied as an instrument for monitoring and to compare the status of early childhood development in different populations worldwide for its cross-culture design, it is not meant to replace traditional screening or diagnostic tools for delayed development. The eHCI emphasizes improving early childhood development at a population level, rather than diagnosing individual children as abnormal. Future studies should take this into consideration according to their target population and goal. Third, although the reliability and validity of eHCI has been tested in this study, there is still no evidence to verify eHCI as a reliable predictor of long-term indicators of academic or working achievement, such as education level, income, and crimes. Longitudinal studies are warranted to test its predictive validity for later outcomes.

The results of reliability and validity analysis suggest that the eHCI is a valid measurement to assess the overall development of Chinese children aged 3–6 years. It has enabled us to monitor the developmental trajectories of children, implement evidence-based interventions to improve their school readiness, and will ultimately support the evaluation of those interventions. The valuable aspect is that the eHCI can be applied to children from diverse cultural backgrounds, which makes it possible to map the global distribution of early childhood development for allocating scarce resources to help those in greatest demand. In the future, longitudinal studies will be conducted to identify its ability to predict important outcomes in later life.