Evaluating health visitor parenting support: validating outcome measures for parental self-efficacy

Parenting support has become an increasing feature of child health services within the United Kingdom but typically, outcome measures available for testing the effectiveness of parenting interventions have been developed and validated elsewhere. This article reports the results of a feasibility study testing the Parenting Self-Agency Measure (PSAM) and subscales from the Self-Efficacy for Parenting Tasks Index (SEPTI) as outcome measures for UK-based parenting support programmes. Forty-six mothers and 10 fathers accessing routine health visitor and school nurse services participated in the test–re-test of the scales and commented separately on the acceptability of scale questions. Very large intra-class correlation results indicated good repeatability but alpha coefficient scores and factor analysis results suggest that UK respondents may not recognize SEPTI subscales items as measuring single dimensions. The PSAM was a more stable measure of parenting self-beliefs than the SEPTI subscales when tested with a UK sample of parents.