The Parental Monitoring of Diabetes Care Scale: Development, Reliability and Validity of a Scale to Evaluate Parental Supervision of Adolescent Illness Management

Abstract

Purpose Monitoring of adolescents’ behavior and whereabouts has been repeatedly identified as an important predictor of adolescent behavioral outcomes. However, to date, measures of parental supervision and monitoring are lacking in the chronic illness literature. The present study describes development and initial evaluation of a measure of parental monitoring of the illness management of adolescents with diabetes: the Parental Monitoring of Diabetes Care scale (PMDC). Methods Ninety-nine parents of 12–18-year-old children with type 1 diabetes completed the PMDC. Measures of illness management and metabolic control were also obtained. Results The PMDC demonstrated good internal consistency (alpha coefficient = .81) and test–rest reliability (ICC = .80). Supporting the instrument’s construct validity, confirmatory factor analysis indicated that a five subdomain structure had an acceptable fit to the data, [χ 2 (181.65)/ df (126) = 1.44, Bollen-Stine χ 2 = 165.03, p = .32, comparative fit index (CFI) = .91, and root-mean-square error of approximation = .07]. In structural equation models, parental monitoring as assessed by the PMDC had a significant direct effect on adolescent diabetes management, accounting for 38% of the variance. Parental monitoring also had a significant indirect effect on metabolic control. Conclusions The PMDC represents an important first step in the development of measures of parental monitoring for use with adolescents with chronic medical conditions.