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The Early Human Capability Index is a holistic measure intended to capture early child development across diverse cultures and contexts.

The eHCI has been developed with a view to capture the key aspects of child development in 3-5 year olds that predict future capabilities.

The eHCI is an easy-to-use survey tool that can be completed by parents/caregivers, child care workers, teachers, allied health and other health or early childhood practitioners. It is not a developmental milestone test, but is a measure of where a child can be placed on a developmental spectrum.

As such the eHCI can determine if a child is thriving or doing poorly on different aspects of development, and can detect developmental change over time.

Developed by Dr Sally Brinkman and Dr Angela Kinnell, the eHCI has uses in the disciplines of epidemiology, population health, economics, early education and global health and development.

The eHCI satisfies the need for the following attributes in an instrument;

  • high sensitivity and specificity,
  • psychometrically reliable,
  • high predictive validity,
  • pragmatic and efficient,
  • can be applied in low to middle-income countries across large populations,
  • designed to minimize social response bias and
  • includes vignettes to maximise comparability across studies, cultures, contexts and countries

The eHCI can be specifically used for: population monitoring and surveillance; impact evaluations of interventions aimed at improving child health, early education and development; and for longitudinal cohort studies looking to predict the future capabilities and capacities of children.

Dr Sally Brinkman
BA, MPH, PhD

Dr Angela Kinnell
BA, Bpsych(Hons), PhD

Meet the Team:

Prof Sally Brinkman

Dr Sarah Howells

Benjamin Lam

Cenez Dsouza