The Home Environment Questionnaire: An Instrument for Assessing Several Behaviorally Relevant Dimensions of Children's Environments

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Abstract
The Home Environment Questionnaire (HEQ), an objective measure of several conceptually meaningful, behaviorally relevant, independent alpha press dimensions of children's psychosocial environments, is described. The HEQ consists of true-false statements which are to be answered by a child's parent, usually the mother. Scales were developed using a rational-statistical strategy. After several stages of data collection and analysis, the HEQ presently comprises 134 items which are assigned to one of eight scales: press Achievement, press Aggression, press Change, press Play, press Parent Absence, press Affiliation, press Sociability, and press Academic-Intellectual. One of these scales, press Aggression, has been subdivided into press External Aggression and press Home Aggression. Data are reported concerning the internal consistency of the scales, interscale correlations, and correlations between the HEQ scales and measures of children's behaviors. On the basis of these preliminary results, the HEQ scales are judged to be conceptually valid, relatively independent, significantly and meaningfully related to several dimensions of clinically important behaviors in children, and, for the most part, reasonalby internally consistent. The need for normative data, unconfounded behavioral and HEQ data, data on an abbreviated form designed for single-parent families, and social desirability data are discussed. Procedures for collecting these data are suggested.

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