Children's home environments, health, behavior, and intervention efforts: a review using the HOME inventory as a marker measure.

The HOME inventories have been widely used in studies of children's health and development. This measure of the quality of stimulation and support available to a child in the home environment reflects the family's social status as well as other family ecological factors, but there is marked variability of scores within social classes. Information derived from HOME also reflect parental characteristics such as marital status, mental health status, and substance abuse. Subscales from the inventories show theoretically meaningful links to children's health, growth, language, intelligence, social competence, and temperament. Although the scales have been used in many different countries, it is unclear whether they precisely capture differences in environmental quality in all cultures. HOME does, however, seem to be sensitive to genetic variations in children and to environmental manipulations such as parent education programs and early intervention programs.