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What Is Home Chaos?

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Beyond SES and general family characteristics, researchers have moved to look for specific characteristics of the family environment that account for individual differences in cognitive abilities and behaviors (Blevins-Knabe, Austin, Musun, Eddy, & Jones, 2000). One such environmental factor under recent study is the concept of home chaos (Petrill, Pike, Price, & Plomin, 2004). This reflects high levels of unpredictability, confusion, and agitation in the home, as well as the lack of daily routines, a sense of disorganization, and time pressures in daily activities. This family character can be measured by a parental questionnaire entitled “The Confusion, Hubbub, and Order Scale” (CHAOS; Matheny,Wachs, Ludwig, & Phillipss 1995). This CHAOS measure has previously been shown in the twin study to be related to several cognitive and behavioral outcomes (Oliver, Pike, & Plomin, 2008). …show more content…

(2004) showed that home chaos accounts for a significant proportion of the shared environmental variance in general cognitive development. CHAOS was an independent predictor of IQ measured by Stanford-Binet test (Hart, Petrill, Deater-Deckard, & Thompson, 2007). To our knowledge, there is only one previous study on the role of home chaos in mathematics development. Docherty, Kovas, and Plomin (2011) examined whether CHAOS accounts for genetic and environment (GE) interaction for mathematical ability in a genome-wide association study of mathematical ability in 1880 ten-year-old children. The researchers found significant GE interactions between a specific genetic-risk loci and home chaos. Thus it can be conclude that the association between the genetic-risk loci and mathematics ability differed as a function of the level of home

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