OBJECTIVE: To develop a study to assess the inter-rater reliability of a modified version of Brown's scale designed to investigate early mother-child interaction. METHOD: Fourteen postpartum women and their newborn babies took part in this study. The tape-recorded observations lasted 15 minutes, and they were performed on the second day after birth, during breast-feeding. In a successive and isolated moment, two evaluators scored each item of the interaction established between the mother and the newborn. In order to do so, a modified version of the scale of Brown and collaborators (1975), was used and submitted to a reliability study. RESULTS: Nine out of ten items of the modified scale revealed an excellent inter-rater agreement: The Kappa coefficient was 0.85 or higher. Only one item showed a moderate degree of agreement = 0.59, concerning "mother holds the baby." The results show that the modified scale is stable if used in a hospital setting for low-income mothers. CONCLUSIONS: The conclusion of this study indicates that categories are a reliable parameter to evaluate mother-baby interaction.
Reliability; scale; mother; baby; interaction
