Assessing Mothers' and Fathers' Authoritarian Attitudes: The Psychometric Properties of a Brief Survey

Abstract

This study used confirmatory factor analysis to examine the structure and factor loadings of an authoritarian parenting scale. The study used data from 315 married couples who had toddlers participating in the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project located in 14 communities across the United States. The sample was diverse and consisted largely of white, African American, and Hispanic low-income parents. The results indicate that the authoritarian parenting scale was a consistent and accurate measure of authoritarian parenting attitudes with both mothers and fathers. Social work practitioners may find this instrument a valuable assessment tool in cases in which there is a focus on parenting skills and attitudes. KEY WORDS: assessment; authoritative parenting; ethnic minority parents; parenting style ********** Parenting style is important to children's development, and when parents show a more authoritarian parenting style they tend to be more demanding and directive with their children. However, one major obstacle for researchers is the difficulty in assessing parenting style. Although Baumrind's (1971) assessment of parenting styles provided a reliable model, later researchers found it difficult to measure both economically and reliably, particularly with relatively small samples. Recently, research in this field has overcome these challenges by relying on the self-report of adolescents' perceptions of their parents' style of parenting (Dornbusch, Ritter, Leiderman, Roberts, & Fraleigh, 1987; Lamborn Mojnts, Steinberg, & Dornbusch, 1991). However, it is difficult to extend this direct survey method to younger children because self-report by young children is often problematic and likely to result in unreliable data. Therefore, most researchers of very young children have relied on parent self-report of parenting attitudes and values (Reitman, Rhode, Hupp, & Altobello, 2002). Some measures of parenting styles have been examined psychometrically; however, the trend has been for researchers to develop new survey instruments for each study rather than to use an existing instrument (Reitman et al., 2002). This trend has resulted in a major discontinuity in the area of parenting style. An assessment tool that shows promise as a brief assessment of attitudes associated with authoritarian parenting is a five-item Authoritarian Parenting Beliefs Subscale (APBS) of the Parental Modernity Scale (PMS) (Schaefer & Edgerton, 1985). Although the development and validation of the original PMS is limited by small samples, the APBS has been used in two national studies of young children; the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development study of early child care and the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation (EHSRE) project. The PMS was intended to access both progressive democratic and traditional attitudes in parents and was initially used to measure these in southern white American and African American samples (Schaefer & Edgerton, 1981, 1985). Early psychometric work on the development and validation of the original 30-item PMS was accomplished with three separate small samples of mothers. Schaefer and Edgerton's (1985) PMS measure of progressive democratic and traditional attitudes in child rearing has solid psychometric properties. It has an internal consistency reliability of .88 and a .90 split-half reliability with Spearman-Brown correction. In addition, this parenting measure has a test-retest reliability of .84. It should be noted that the reliability scores for the PMS were derived from a small sample of only African American and white American mothers with children in kindergarten in the Piedmont region of North Carolina. In addition, the earlier assessment of the reliability of the PMS failed to include fathers. An often neglected issue when cross-group examinations are conducted is the comparability of the measures across the groups. …