II. Assessing an assessment: conceptual considerations, methodological issues, and a perspective on the future of the Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale

The Brazelton Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale is a behavior analysis instrument which provides the researcher with a systematic way of eliciting and documenting a series of complex behavioral parameters reflecting the healthy term newborn's current repertoire of organization and functioning. This assessment focuses on the newborn's adaptation as a social interactive organism embedded in a feedback system with an adult caregiver. It brings out those processes which the individual newborn uses to deal with his animate and inanimate environment and yields a series of defined and scaled behavioral descriptors which permit quantification of aspects of behavioral parameters reflecting such subsystems of functioning as physiological organization, motoric organization, state organization, and interactive organization. As such, it provides a window on the complexity of current organization of the human newborn. It does not provide a ready-made method of synthesizing the information gained about the individual newborn. It becomes the researcher's task to develop a synthesis method appropriate to the question under investigation.