Children's Reports of Parental Behavior: An Inventory

The development of a set of scales designed to collect children's reports of parental behavior is reported. Previous researches on inventory measures of children's perceptions of parental behavior and on their validity are noted. Twenty-six concepts such as ignoring, possessiveness, and lax discipline were selected that were hypothesized to sample all sectors of a conceptual model for parental behavior. A 10-item scale was developed for each concept from items that describe specific, observable behaviors. Internal-consistency reliabilities of the scales are reported for normal boys, normal girls, and delinquent boys. The discriminative power of the scales is demonstrated by an analysis of differences between normal and delinquent boys.