Abstract:
The Escala de Desarrollo Infantil de Kent (EDIK) is the Castilian Spanish version of the Kent Infant Development Scale (KIDS) and is an assessment tool that used caregivers' observations to measure the developmental status of infants in the first year of life. It is intended to help pediatricians and other child professionals in Spain to screen for developmental delay, to measure the developmental effects of medical and psychological treatment, and to improve communication between pediatricians and parents. The EDIK contains 252 items that describe typical infant behaviors which are classified as belonging to one of five domains: Cognitive, Motor, Language, Self-help, and Social. The caregiver simply records whether the child, 1) still exhibits the behavior, 2) used to but has outgrown it, 3) can no longer do it, or 4) cannot do it yet. Items are not presented in developmental order to make deliberate over-representation of a child's behaviors less likely. The overall score is a Development Quotient which describes an infant's developmental status compared to other infants of the same age. It is expressed in months and is similar to the concept of "mental age" from IQ testing. Examiners need no special training and test administration time varies for each respondent. Tests can be scored by hand or by the publisher, in which case a response profile printout and list of subscores by domain is generated. The full scale score, however, is more reliable and valid than individual domain scores. Therefore, the test developers recommend using the full scale score for determining a child's developmental level. Test norms were established on 662 healthy infants in Barcelona, Spain. Correlations between age and EDIK scores were in the .90s, as were inter-rater reliability coefficients. Test-retest reliability coefficients were in the high .90s, and cross validation on the Denver Developmental Scale shows r=.97. The test is also available in Spanish, German, and Dutch versions.