Grantee: Reach Out and Read
Study Type: Validation Study
Principal Investigator: Tyson Barker – Institute for Children’s Success
Project Description: The CONNECT Survey is a concise 13-item parent co-designed measure of the parent/caregiver-clinician relationships, filling a gap in existing measures by capturing families’ unique experiences in outpatient pediatric care. This validation study used a primary dataset of 9,825 caregiver surveys from 131 pediatric clinics via the Mid-Atlantic ROR network for psychometric validation, and a secondary dataset from Florida ROR clinics for test-retest reliability.
Key Findings: The results revealed that the CONNECT Survey has high internal consistency (alpha = .993), indicating that the 13 items capture a shared construct. This was true across all racial and ethnic subgroups, insurance types, and ages, suggesting the scale performs consistently across these groups. Test-retest reliability from participants completing the survey immediately following a well-child visit and again five to seven days later was high (95.15 percent agreement on average), though findings should be interpreted with caution given the presence of ceiling effects and limited variability in responses. Tests of validity revealed good, though sometimes modest, concurrent and convergent validity. Measurement invariance analyses revealed that White caregivers reported more positive experiences than other racial/ethnic groups, those with private insurance reported more positive experiences than those with public insurance, and caregivers of toddlers gave the most positive ratings, while those with preschool-aged children reported lower scores.
Study Citation: Reach Out and Read and Institute for Child Success. (2025). Validation of the CONNECT survey co-designed with parents to strengthen parent/caregiver-clinician relationships in pediatric primary care.
Full report here.
The Key Findings above were reproduced from the published report and do not necessarily reflect interpretation of Overdeck Family Foundation staff.
