Psychometric Properties of the Parental Bonding Instrument: Data from a Chinese Adolescent Sample in Hong Kong

Abstract

Although researchers widely use the Parental Bonding Instrument (PBI) to measure parenting behaviour in terms of parental care and overprotection, its development using Western samples has cast doubt on its applicability among non-Western ones. In response, we examined psychometric properties of the Chinese version of the PBI by using survey data collected from a sample of 1997 Chinese adolescents in Hong Kong, whose mean age was 14.6 years and 50.3% of whom were girls. Our results supported a 4-factor structure representing caring, indifferent, overprotective, and autonomous parenting behaviours that we confirmed to be applicable to paternal and maternal parenting behaviours. Results of Cronbach’s alpha tests indicated that the measure is of good reliability, and correlations between the PBI and character strengths confirmed the scale’s good concurrent validity. Parental care and autonomy positively correlated with bravery, honesty, perseverance, kindness, love, self-regulation, social intelligence, and fairness, whereas indifference and overprotection negatively correlated with those eight character strengths. Parenting differences emerged regarding parental and children’s gender. In all, the Chinese version of the PBI proved to be a psychometrically robust measure for capturing adolescents’ perceptions of parenting behaviours in Hong Kong, which we discuss in terms of implications for future research.