Observing Play Activity: The Children’s Developmental Play Instrument (CDPI) with Reliability Studies

摘要

The Children’s Developmental Play Instrument is a multidimensional tool intended for use in observing the play activity of mainstream children. The instrument consists of scales to segment a child’s activity and to analyze the child’s play activity into Affective, Cognitive, Narrative and Developmental Components. Subsequently, the Functional Analysis is used to rate the Engagement of the child, the Use of Symbols by the child and the child’s Play Style. Two reliability studies reveal predominantly good to excellent levels of consensus between raters. These positive findings suggest the need for additional research to gather further data with groups of children from varying chronological ages and social groups. These play activity ratings, used in conjunction with other ratings of the child’s mileau, can serve as indicators of the general well-being of the child.