Photo credit: Reynardo Etenia Wongso, Unsplash
The Caregiver-Reported Early Development Instruments (CREDI) is a set of population-level measures of early childhood development (ECD) for children from birth to age three (0-36 months). As the name suggests, the CREDI exclusively relies on caregiver reports, and thus primarily focuses on milestones and behaviors that are easy for caregivers to understand, observe, and describe.
Key Characteristics of the CREDI
1. The CREDI is an open-source tool developed for the global community. You do not need permission to use the CREDI, and there are no fees or royalties involved.
2. The CREDI has been tested in more than 15 high-, middle- and low-income countries, and is designed to be culturally and linguistically neutral. Adjustments of the tool to local contexts should not be necessary. You should contact the CREDI research team before making adaptations.
3. There are two versions of the CREDI: A Short Form, which has exactly 20 questions for each child (depending on age), and a more detailed Long Form which has up to 100 questions per child (depending on age and ability). For large-scale surveys and monitoring efforts, we recommend the use of the Short Form. For research and evaluation projects, the Long Form will provide more domain-specific detail.
4. The CREDI Short Form creates a summary score for children’s overall developmental status. The Long Form creates domain-specific developmental scores as well as overall developmental status.
5. The CREDI was designed as a population-level developmental assessment, and was not designed as an individual screening tool to detect early developmental delays or disorders.
Getting Started
To get started with the CREDI, visit our Materials page. This page provides English versions of the CREDI Short and Long Forms, as well as all necessary materials for implementation, scoring, and interpretation. We recommend that all new CREDI users start by reading the CREDI User Guide, which provides detailed explanations of the background, purpose, implementation procedures, and resources for using the CREDI. We also recommend that new users review our Frequently Asked Questions page.
Additionally, please complete our User Survey. This User Survey is instrumental in improving the accessibility of the CREDI through the providing of translations, de-identitfied data, and various elements of feedback. Even if you do not plan on sharing data or translations, we encourage you to leave your contact information in the designated areas in the event you would be available to discuss your use of CREDI with the team and other researchers.