Influence of Maternal Knowledge Regarding Infant Development and Self Efficacy on Home Environment and Infant Development Outcomes in Rural and Urban Areas
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Date
2012
Authors
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Journal ISSN
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Publisher
UAS, Dharwad
Abstract
The influence of maternal knowledge regarding infant development and self efficacy
on home environment and infant developmental outcomes in rural and urban areas was
studied on a sample of 80 mothers of infants. MacPhee’s (1983) Knowledge of Infant
Development Index (KIDI), Caldwell and Bradly’s (1984) HOME Inventory, Sud’s (1998)
Self-efficacy scale, Agarwal’s (2005) Socio-economic status scale were administered to the
mothers. Nutritional anthropometry was employed to assess the infant developmental
outcomes. Correlation-coefficient, chi-square and regression analysis were used. The results
revealed that rural mothers had slightly higher scores than urban mothers on ‘right answers’
and ‘accuracy answers’ and they were significantly low on ‘wrong answers’. The
demographic factors such as parent’s occupation, family size, income, SES did not influence
the parental knowledge. Home environment score was significantly higher among urban
mothers than rural mothers. There was significant association between home environment
and infant’s age in urban group only but infant’s gender was significantly associated in both
rural and urban group where in boys had better home environment than girls. On Selfefficacy
rural and urban mothers did not differ significantly. Family income was associated
with self-efficacy in case of rural mothers only. More number of urban infants (40%) fell
under normal category of nutritional status while 80 percent of rural were in undernourished
category.
Maternal knowledge’s ‘accuracy’ score was significantly correlated with weight of
urban infants indicating as ‘accuracy score’ increased, weight of urban children also
increased. Self-efficacy did not influence infant developmental outcomes. Through in case of
rural group the maternal knowledge ‘wrong score’ was negatively related with self-efficacy
indicating that as the self-efficacy of rural mothers increased the’ wrong score’ decreased.