Parents' Interactive Problem-Solving Behavior and Emotion Studied With Audio Compared With Video Source.

Background and purpose: Parents' communication and problem-solving interaction with each other and with clinicians influences the caregiving of infants with a chronic health problem, making in-depth study of this interaction critical for design of interventions to support caregiving. This study, however, has been severely limited by lack of observational methods that can be applied in home, clinic and community settings. The Iowa Family Interaction Rating Scales provide comprehensive description of communicative and problem-solving behavior and emotion, but have only been applied to video-recorded interaction. Audio recording, in contrast to video recording, has the advantage of being unobtrusive, readily accessible, and generally acceptable, increasing the opportunity for focused examination and intervention of parents' interaction with each other or with clinicians. Our study objective was to examine the agreement of scores obtained on parents' interactive problem-solving behavior coded with the Iowa Family Interaction Rating Scales using an audio-recorded source for coding compared with coding from a video-recorded source.

Method: In secondary analysis, audio-recordings were derived from video recordings of 15 parent-parent interactions. Audio recordings were created and coded blind of the original video recording and coding.

Results: Using Gwet's AC₁ coefficient, agreement was at least moderate (0.61 - 0.80) for 69.1% of paired codes, signifying reliability of coding from audio recording for most codes.

Implications for practice: Selected Iowa Family Interaction Rating Scales can be used with acceptable reliability for coding parents' interactive problem-solving behavior from audio source, advancing the study of parent interactive-problem solving behavior and potentially parents' problem solving with clinicians.