This guide is a reference to audio visual materials relevant for the professional development of home visitors. It was designed to assist educators, program directors, and trainers identify materials helpful in teaching home visiting skills. The videos should be of value to individuals working in the fields of education, social services, and health, and for both professional and lay workers.
This guide is a companion to the Guide to Written Materials for Home Visiting, also published by the Center for Home Visiting. To prepare this audio visual guide we contacted approximately fifty sources, including national organizations that focus on child health, education, and family-centered practice. We reviewed listings from commercial publishers and resource catalogs developed by other organizations, such as the Southeastern Institute for Faculty Training at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Center on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill campus. The audio visual training materials collected and reviewed represent a wide range of sources and objectives.
In Part I, we provide a review of fifty of these audio visual training materials. In Part II, we describe videos that provide information on specific home visiting programs. In Part III, we list and provide ordering information on additional audiovisual materials that may be of interest to home visitors.
Description of Training Materials To provide the reader with information on each set of training materials, we organized our review in the following manner. Each review begins with an abstract that summarizes the background, purpose, and format of the materials. We then provide more specific information on the content, presentation, and literacy levels. For each of these topic headings, we summarize the strengths and limitations of each set of materials. Costs and ordering information are also provided.
To assist in determining the appropriateness of the materials for the reader’s purpose, we also categorized each set of materials by major topic and presented the reviews by topic area. The categories include the following: Skills for Home Visitors; Family-Centered Concepts and Skills; Early Intervention; Family Support; Nurturing and Child Abuse and Neglect Prevention; and Home Health. When the content of the videos clearly overlapped two or more focus areas, we identified these additional focus areas in the review.
To conduct our reviews we used a general instrument adapted from one developed by the Health Communications and Research Laboratory at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the print evaluation tool developed by Doak and Doak (1996). We identified three areas of this instrument, content, presentation, and production as the focus of our reviews. Within each of these areas, specific aspects of the resources are evaluated. Content issues include definitions of purpose and intended audience and consideration of multicultural issues. Presentation issues include organization, length/pace, use of summaries and reviews, and interactive elements. Production issues include acting/staging and use of stills, and on-screen text or graphics used to illustrate or reinforce content. In many of the reviews, stills, on-screen text, and auditory signals are referred to as auditory and visual markers. Most technical terms are self explanatory or are defined in the context of the reviews.
Doak, C.C., Doak L.G., & Root, J. H. (1996) Teaching patients with low literacy skills. Philadelphia: Lippincott.
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