Development and validation of the Modeling of Parental Anxiety Questionnaire

Abstract

Parental anxious modeling is assumed to be a risk factor for child anxiety. Until now there has been no self-assessment scale available that measures parental modeling of anxiety in a comprehensive way. Our aim with this study was to bridge this gap by developing the Modeling of Parental Anxiety Questionnaire (MPAQ). To do this, we generated an item pool containing 51 statements covering different aspects of parental modeling of anxious and non-anxious behaviors. A sample of Swedish parents (N = 1092) of children aged 4–12, answered an online survey comprising the generated item pool, the Parental Overprotection Scale (OP) and the PROMIS Anxiety short forms (the adult version and the parent proxy report scale). A factor analysis of the items of parental modeling indicated a structure with four separate factors. These factors formed the final four subscales of MPAQ; (1) being curios and content, (2) being on guard, (3) displaying anxiety and avoidance, and (4) displaying stress. The Cronbach’s alpha coefficients of the subscale scores ranged from moderate to good. Linear regression analysis showed that the displaying anxiety and avoidance-subscale had the strongest association with child anxiety symptoms. These findings show that MPAQ demonstrates adequate psychometric properties and has potential for being used in research and clinical settings, for example to identify potential targets for parenting interventions and to measure mediation effects.