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

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.