Towards a tailored measure of parental attitudes: an approach to the evaluation of one aspect of intervention projects with parents of handicapped children.

One important aspect of early intervention projects involving parents of handicapped children, namely changes in parental attitudes, would seem to have been elusive to study. This paper describes an approach to measurement in this area in which the measure is constructed around the specified objectives of the project under investigation. An outline is given of the process by which a Maternal Self-Rating Scale was devised, together with a description of the Scale and evidence regarding its usefulness within an evaluative study.