Child Life Specialist-Patient Relationships: Measuring Relationship Quality

The quality of the relationships that children share with adults in their lives has consistently been associated with children’s outcomes. Standardized measures that reliably capture high-quality adult-child relationships have been developed and utilized to create targeted programs to improve children’s lives. Though Certified Child Life Specialists (CCLS) spend much of their time building relationships with patients, no such measure exists within the profession of child life. The current study sought to explore possible measurement tools to assess the quality of CCLS-patient relationships. We adapted existing relationship measures, the Student Teacher Relationship Scale (STRS) and the Agnew Relationship Measure (ARM), and examined whether these measures were applicable, reliable, and valid in measuring CCLS-patient relationships. Data from 77 CCLS were analyzed and revealed that the ARM was preferred by CCLS. The adapted subscales demonstrated adequate internal consistency. Significant correlations among the subscales and variation in scores based on CCLS and patient characteristics indicated construct validity of the adapted measures. A 17-item version of the adapted ARM scale is recommended for future research measuring CCLS-patient relationship quality.