Do health professionals agree on the parenting potential of pregnant women?
Although retrospective studies have suggested that the signs of potential parenting problems are present well before the child is born, successful prenatal screening is infrequent or absent in most clinical settings. For the most part, this lack of screening reflects the inherent difficulties in developing and using practical and reliable tools of assessment. Problems of reliability suggest that professionals from related disciplines often differ in their evaluations of clinical samples. This pilot study was designed to determine whether 12 professionals, four from each of three health disciplines concerned with child-abuse detection (nursing, medicine and social work), could agree on parenting risk status of 15 pregnant women. Assessment protocols were comprised of the most frequently cited predictive signs of poor parenting. Each rater evaluated the transcript of 15 prenatal interviews. The results indicate inconsistencies in rating both among and within the professional groups. These inconsistencies extended not only to the individual criteria from which the final scores were derived, but also to the total risk status. Even though specific instructions were given for the use of risk criteria, the raters often violated the instructions for coding in favor of their own idiosyncratic judgements.