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Development and Validation of 18-Item Short Form for the Parents as Social Context Questionnaire

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Abstract

Parenting styles have been shown to have direct and indirect influences on child, adolescent, and adult psychosocial outcomes. The Parents as Social Context Questionnaire assesses how well an individual’s parenting style provides for their child’s psychological needs on six unipolar subscales: warmth, rejection, structure, chaos, autonomy, support, and coercion. The aim of the present study was to increase the clinical and research utility of the Parents as Social Context Questionnaire by: (1) establishing a short form; (2) evaluating the fit of the established short form with the unipolar, six dimensional and the bipolar, three-dimensional frameworks of parenting styles; and (3) assessing the reliability and validity of the established short form. Three-hundred and fifty-one parents of a child between the ages of 1 and 12 years were recruited by university students in the United States and completed the current study as part of a larger online survey. First, the number of items per latent factor in the 30-item Parents as Social Context Questionnaire was reduced. A unipolar, six-dimensional structure with positive and negative higher-order factors demonstrated good fit, while a bipolar, three-dimensional structure did not. Results demonstrated adequate to good internal consistency, convergent validity, and criterion validity. The current study produced preliminary support for an 18-item, unipolar, six-dimensional short form of the Parents as Social Context Questionnaire (i.e., PASCQ-18), which has the potential to allow for more widespread assessment of parenting styles in clinical and research settings by decreasing patient and participant burden and promoting a higher response rate.

Highlights

  • Parenting styles impact child outcomes and should be more regularly assessed in clinical and research settings.

  • Shortening measures of parenting styles would decrease patient/participant burden and promote a higher response rate.

  • Results provide preliminary support for an 18-item, unipolar six-dimensional Parents as Social Context Questionnaire.

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Author contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception, study design, and material preparation. Data collection was performed by Amy C. Lang and W. Hobart Davies. Data analyses were performed by Rachel L. Ankney and Kristoffer S. Berlin. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Amy C. Lang and Rachel L. Ankney and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2441 E. Hartford Ave, Milwaukee, WI, 53201, United States

    Amy C. Lang & W. Hobart Davies

  2. Department of Psychology, The University of Memphis, 400 Innovation Drive, Memphis, TN, 38111, United States

    Rachel L. Ankney & Kristoffer S. Berlin

Authors
  1. Amy C. Lang
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  2. Rachel L. Ankney
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  3. Kristoffer S. Berlin
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  4. W. Hobart Davies
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Amy C. Lang.

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Conflict of Interest

The authors have no relevant financial or nonfinancial interested to disclose. The authors did not receive support from any organization for the submitted work. The current study was approved by the Institutional Review Board prior to data collection. The current study utilized human participants and obtained informed consent from participants within the online survey. Participants were required to indicate that they were at least 18 years old, were voluntarily participating, and understood that the student who recruited them would not be penalized if they chose not to participate.

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Lang, A.C., Ankney, R.L., Berlin, K.S. et al. Development and Validation of 18-Item Short Form for the Parents as Social Context Questionnaire. J Child Fam Stud 31, 507–517 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-021-02177-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-021-02177-x

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