Psychological Bulletin 1989. Vol. 106, No.

1,29-58

Copyright 1989 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0033-2909/89/S00.75

Parental Attitudes Toward Child Rearing: Instruments, Issues, and Implications

George W. Holden and Lee A. Edwards
University of Texas

Describes historical use of surveys to assess parents' global child-rearing attitudes and reviews the structure and content of the 83 parent attitude questionnaires published from 1899 through 1986 designed to quantify variations in parental attitudes and, presumably, parental behavior. Inspection of the surveys' psychometric properties reveals marginally acceptable levels of reliability and questionable validity. One suspected source of problems with the instruments, the use of vague and ambiguous items, was confirmed in a study of mothers' reactions to one survey. In addition to instrument errors, conceptual problems associated with assumptions about the structure of parental attitudes and how attitudes relate to parental behavior are discussed. Alternative methods for assessing parental social cognitions and individual differences in parents are advocated.

One of the oldest and most important questions in psychology concerns the role the environment plays in the development of an individual. At least in the opening scenes of ontogeny, parents are generally recognized to be the protagonists and the family to be the "primary arena" for socialization (Maccoby, 1984). Parents have frequently been implicated as principal causal agents in their children's behavioral, emotional, personality, and cognitive development. This influence is achieved through a variety of active and passive, reactive and nonreactive processes (Baumrind, 1980; Radke-Yarrow & Zahn-Waxler, 1986; Scarr & McCartney, 1983; Sears, Maccoby, & Levin, 1957; B. B. Whiting, 1980). Consequently, a basic research strategy has been to identify variations in parents or parental behavior and correlate these differences with child variables. The approach used to identify parental variation has often been to quantify parental attitudes toward child rearing. Reliance on parental attitudes as indicative of parent behavior or the home environment developed rapidly into a major paradigm for the investigation of parent-child relations. The proliferation of work in this area is illustrated by the date of the first review on the topicover 50 years ago (Stogdill, 1936a). The focus on parental attitudes attracted considerable attention because it was intuitively appealing, parsimonious, and expeditious. Individual differences in parents' global child-rearing attitudes were assumed to reflect differences in aggregate parental behavior and, consequently, to result in differential child out-

We thank J. Amis, L. Boyden, J. Leitner, S. Satterwhite, A. Seth, P. Underwood, and D. Zamora for their assistance in the library research and with the interview study. This work was assisted by grants from the University of Texas Research Institute and IBM's Project Quest. M. A. Easterbrooks, W. A. Goldberg, J. H. Langlois, J. T. Spence, W. B. Swann, R. H. Woodson, J. \bung, and the anonymous reviewers provided constructive comments on earlier drafts. Lee Edwards is now at the University of Maryland. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to George Holden, Department of Psychology, University of Te\as, Austin. Texas 78712.

come. Thus, when Frank (1965) could not find that maternal attitudes or other indices of the family were related to child psychopathology, he concluded that family variables may not have a direct etiological role (cf. Zuckerman, 1966). In fact, evidence has been accumulating about the many ways in which the family environment does indeed affect children's development, both in clinical and nonclinical populations (e.g., Alexander & Malouf, 1983; Clarke-Stewart & Apfel, 1978; Maccoby & Martin, 1983). But the study of parental attitudes has contributed little to those findings. As will be argued, parental attitudes do not provide an adequate assessment of the family environment, for both conceptual and methodological reasons. For parental attitudes to influence children as hypothesized, the attitudes must be stable, be coherent, and reflect behavior. Furthermore, accurate quantification of parental attitudes depends on reliable and valid methods. Though parental child-rearing attitudes have sometimes been determined through interviews (e.g., Sears et al., 1957), they have most frequently been assessed through paper and pencil surveys; this review will be limited to those questionnaires. A reappraisal of parental attitudes toward child rearing, as assessed on questionnaires, is needed for at least four reasons. As one of the first methods developed for the study of parentchild relations, the surveys continue to be used widely today. Moreover, their use is increasing. Twenty-one new instruments appeared in the first half of the 1980s, the most ever published over a 5-year period. The question of how the questionnaires have changed in the face of new knowledge and conceptualizations of parent-child relations will be addressed. A second reason to reassess surveys of parental attitudes is that they have received insufficient critical review as a methodology. No comprehensive appraisal of their psychometric properties or limitations exists. Third, given the recent surge in attention to the domain of parental thoughts and beliefs (e.g., Goodnow, 1984; Sigel, 1985a), the placement of parental attitudes on the landscape of parental social cognition is needed. Finally, the tacit assumptions underlying the use of parental child-rearing attitudes raise several important conceptual and theoretical issues
29

30

GEORGE W. HOLDEN AND LEE A. EDWARDS

regarding parents and parent-child relations that have gone unaddressed. These issues include the structure of the attitudes, how the attitudes relate to behavior, and how parental attitudes fit into models of parent-child relations. For the purpose of organizing and clarifying this research approach, parent child-rearing attitude questionnairessubsequently referred to as PCRAshave been loosely denned. As will be shown, the instruments are directed at not only parental attitudes, but also practices, beliefs, and values. Nevertheless, a coherent set of parental self-report instruments dealing with child rearing has been gathered together. These PCRAs possess a number of appealing attributes; their popularity as research instruments is no surprise. In comparison with the study of behavior, the benefits of documenting global attitudes are thought to lie in the ease of assessing the target attitudes, their resistance to being affected by situational factors, and their convenience and utility in predicting behavior (e.g., McGuire, 1985). As paper and pencil instruments, they are easy to develop and distribute, inexpensive for both the researchers' and subjects' time, and usually yield data in a form convenient for analysis. Furthermore, parental attitudes have been viewed as a useful concept because they provide a shorthand term that presumably captures or summarizes aggregate behavior. Their appeal is enhanced by the paucity of economical data collection methods; observations and interviews offer relatively costly alternatives. Although developmental psychologists have been the greatest producers and consumers of PCRAs, psychologists from diverse areas have used the method in a variety of research endeavors. Questions in clinical, community, counseling, cross-cultural, educational, personality, school, and social psychology have been studied with the surveys. The utility of PCRAs for a wide range of purposes can be illustrated in their having been used to quantify the social environment (Breitmayer & Ramey, 1986), study interindividual family differences (Byrne, 1965), reflect the impact of paternal employment and the social network (Cotterell, 1986), identify differences between ethnic or cultural groups (Durrett, O'Bryant, & Pennebaker, 1975), examine parental correlates of child pathology (R. V. Freeman & Grayson, 1955) or cognitive functioning (Camp, Swift, & Swift, 1982), compare foster mothers with biological mothers (Paulson, Grossman, & Shapiro, 1974), assess the effectiveness of parent education programs (Radin, 1972), and screen parents at risk for abuse (Avison, Turner, & Noh, 1986). Given the continuing popularity of this methodology, it is curious that no critical reviews have appeared in over 20 years. That is not to say PCRAs have gone unchallenged. Almost since the inception of the method, multiple concerns have been raised (e.g., Watson, 1933). The article preceding the first appearance of Schaefer and Bell's (1958) popular Parent Attitude Research Instrument (PARI) was a methodological warning on the use of questionnairesby the coauthor of the PARI (Bell, 1958). The most frequent criticisms of the surveys dealt with the ambiguity of the items, susceptibility to response sets such as acquiescence, the influence of education on responses, and the uncertain attitude-behavior link. Two reviewers were so adamant about their censure of the PARI that they concluded their abstract with the words: "It has served as an important steppingstone, but difficulties inherent in its design and structure suggest

that it would be profitable to work toward new approaches" (Becker & Krug, 1965, p. 329). The goal of this article is to catalog the extant PCRAs and to assess their current state as research instruments. This appraisal will begin with a brief historical report on the origins of interest in parental attitudes. A description of the format and content of the questionnaires follows. Next, the reliability and validity of the instruments will be reviewed. The results from an interview study, designed to elicit mothers' reactions to items from a representative PCRA, are then reported. Conceptual issues associated with how well PCRAs fit with our knowledge of parents and parent-child relations are then discussed, followed by proposals for future work in this area.

Origins of Interest in Parental Attitudes

In the early part of this century, a confluence of at least three sources implicated the role of parents in general and parental attitudes in particular for determining child outcome. These sources included psychoanalysts and psychologists working with clinical populations, psychologists studying parents and children by using social psychology's new construct of attitudes, and psychologists and others initiating the parent education movement. Psychoanalytic theory provided a major impetus for the study of parental attitudes as a key determinant of child personality. Interestingly, Freud devoted few words to parents' attitudes and their effect on child outcome (e.g., Freud, 1936). As one psychologist noted,
the references to the significance of parent-child relationships occur relatively infrequently in Freud's writings.... On the whole Freud is not highly sensitive to variations in parental attitudes and their effect on a child's behavior and personality. Freud's contribution consists in outlining some of the main dynamic factors which operate in the human economy, and he has left it to his successors to discover how these apply in the varieties of human relationships. (Symonds, 1949, p. 174)

The evolvement of Freud's ideas about the parent-child relationship was left to individuals such as E. Jones (1923), Homey (1933), andRibble(!943). The major legacy of the psychoanalytic approach to parental attitudes has been in the study of parental acceptance and rejection, a topic addressed in over 300 studies (Rohner, 1986). The basic premise is that the "normal" attitude of the parent is one of affection (Bakwin & Bakwin, 1940). If the parent's emotional needs have not been met at some point, however, the parent will then carry these personality needs into his or her parenting behavior. These needs may then result in overprotecting or rejecting the child, as theorized by David Levy (1931. 1943). Overprotection, or prolonging infantile care through excessive control, was thought to be produced by a variety of precipitators such as current anxiety or previously experienced parental rejection. In contrast to overprotection, lying at the opposite end of the bipolar scale, is rejection. Levy's hypotheses about the causes and effects of those salient styles of maternal interaction provoked a series of studies into overprotection and rejection in the 1930s by social workers as well as clinicians (Hough, 1932; Newell, 1934; Witmer, 1932). Work has continued in this area (e.g., Zemlick & Watson, 1953), with the most recent pro-

PARENT CHILD-REARING ATTITUDES ponent being Rohner (1975, 1986), who has developed the Parental Acceptance-Rejection Theory. In addition to overprotection and rejection, attention was directed to several other "attitudinal excesses" in parents, including anxiety, authority, indulgence, perfectionism, permissiveness, responsibility, solicitude, and strictness (Bakwin & Bakwin, 1940; Jackson, Klatskin, & Wilkin, 1952; Sewall, 1930; Symonds, 1949). One result of this work was a therapeutic focus on maternal attitudes (Moore, 1933; Rogers, 1939) and the development of "attitude therapy" designed specifically to modify parental attitudes (Bronner, 1936; Garrett, 1936). The child guidance clinics begun in the 1920s also focused treatment on the parent-child relationship to deal with child maladjustment in the home and school (Watson, 1953). The psychoanalytic approach had a substantial impact in conceptualizing parental attitudes as pervasive regulators of behavior that reflected the "atmospheric conditions of the home" (Richards, 1926, p. 241). Parental attitudes emerged as a major etiology of children's behavioral maladjustments. We recognize more and more that we are dealing with problem environments and problem parents rather than problem children. . . . The parents' experiences, their attitudes and behavior, influence the character and behavior of the children, who in turn carry over these attitudes into their later lives, their marital adjustments and in relation to their own families. Thus a vicious circle is created. (M. Field, 1940, p. 293) The second major influence on the study of parental attitudes was the advent of attitudes as a dominant concept and a quantifiable entity in social psychology by the 1930s (Allport, 1935; Likert, 1932;Thurstone&Chave, 1929). The construct was appropriated rapidly for the study of parents (Stogdill, 1931). Although many psychologists recognized that parental attitudes did not necessarily reflect behavior, attitudes were thought of as filters that indirectly affected parental behavior and thereby reflected the child's environment (Francis & Fillmore, 1934; Updegraff, 1939). As within the psychoanalytic framework, attitudes rapidly earned a reputation for playing the prominent role in a child's development: "Parental attitudes must be of paramount importance because the very young child is exposed to them continually, and the attitudes themselves are relatively fixed and constant" (Pearson, 1931, p. 290). The study of attitudes expanded rapidly in the 1930s and 1940s with investigations into maternal attitudes toward breastfeeding (M. Freeman, 1932), hyperactivity in children (Ginsburg, 1934), and sex education (Ackerley, 1935), for example. When researchers began to realize that particular child-rearing events, such as weaning, were not associated with child personality development (e.g., Orlansky, 1949), the impact of long-term exposure to parental attitudes gained added credence. Those individuals promoting parent education or research to aid parents formed the third source that directed attention toward parental attitudes (Stoddard, 1931). A program at the University of Iowa was begun in the early 1900s to collect and disseminate knowledge about child-rearing: "If research could improve corn and hogs it could also improve children" (R. R. Sears, 1975, p. 19). Thus, the parent education movement took form. Within this approach, parental attitudes were construed as beliefs about how to rear children (Fitz-Simons, 1935; Ojemann, 1935a). Along these lines, Wolfenstein (1953) described

31

how advances in knowledge about child rearing contributed to changes in parents' attitudes. Modifying parental attitudes through the provision of new knowledge continues to be a central focus of parent education today (Florin & Dokecki, 1983; Wulf & Bartenstein, 1980). Separately, the psychoanalytic, social-psychological, and parent education perspectives highlighted the importance of parental attitudes, an ambiguous and ill-defined construct. Sometimes two of these perspectives coalesced, as illustrated in a textbook for physicians: "Defects in parental attitudes may be dependent, primarily, on inexperience or ignorance of proper methods of child rearing or they may be the expression of distortions in the parental personalities" (Bakwin & Bakwin, 1942, p. 11). Together, these three views promoted parental attitudes as a major topic for study. One consequence of the prominence bestowed on parental attitudes was the proliferation of questionnaires designed to assess a variety of parental childrearing attitudes. The next section reviews the structure and content of those instruments.

Instruments Because of the large number of questionnaires developed for collecting data from parents, some limits have been imposed on the instruments included here. Although this review is focused on questionnaires directed at self-reports of parental attitudes toward their children, most surveys tap other elements of social cognition as well, such as beliefs and thoughts about child-rearing practices. In an effort to be comprehensive and inclusive, any questionnaire designed for parents with a focus on childrearing attitudes or beliefs was included in this review; thus, a few instruments that are not ostensibly "attitude" surveys are included. Questionnaires were excluded if they contained fewer than 10 items, if the majority of items was not aimed at parental attitudes or beliefs, or if the survey was not directed at child rearing. For example, instruments designed to assess only parental practices (e.g., Crase, Clark, & Pease, 1979; Jackson, 1956), parental attitudes toward pregnancy (e.g., Despres, 1937; Kumar, Robson, & Smith, 1984), children's perceptions of parental attitudes (Spence & Helmreich, 1978), or parental feelings of satisfaction (Ragozin, Basham, Crnic, Greenberg, & Robinson, 1982) or stress (Loyd & Abidin, 1985) were omitted. Similarly, instruments developed for parents of handicapped or exceptional children were omitted, although for a number of years this has been an active area of research (e.g., Love, 1970). With those restrictions, efforts were made to locate all of the parental attitude instruments that were developed through 1986, using a computer search and handbooks of psychological measurement instruments (Goldman & Saunders, 1982; Johnson, 1976; Shaw & Wright, 1967; Straus, 1969; Touliatos, Perlmutter, & Straus, in press). In spite of these multiple resources, a number of instruments were found that were not indexed. It is safe to assume that most of the published PCRAs were located, but the listing is not exhaustive. As those familiar with the origins of developmental psychology in this country may have suspected (see Cairns, 1983), the first PCRA was developed in collaboration with G. Stanley Hall (C. H. Sears, 1899). The "syllabus" consisted of a series of ques(lext continues on page 35)

32

GEORGE W. HOLDEN AND LEE A. EDWARDS

Table 1 Chronological Listing and Description of Parent Child-Rearing Attitude Questionnaires Published from 1899 to 1986 Reliability information" None None None

Instrument Untitled Unfilled Untitled

Study C. H. Sears, 1899 Laws, 1927 Stogdill, 1931

Content/subscales Views on child punishment Physical, Social, and Emotional health Undesirable child behavior

No. of items Unspecified

346 in 4 parts

Response scale Unspecified Multiple response formats 10-pt. seriousness or undesirability 3-pt. agree/ disagree and omit 10-pt. seriousness Multiple response formats

70

Attitude Toward Freedom of Children (ATFC-I and II) Untitled Untitled

Kochetal., 1934

Amount of independence and autonomy in child Effect of parental behavior on child 24 subscales (e.g., Use of fear for child control; Providing sex information) Developmental importance of parent or child actions Self-reliance in children

Two 33-item forms

Stogdill, 1934 Ackerley, 1935

60 367

None

Untitled Attitude Toward Self Reliance

Ojemann, 1935a Ojemann, 1935b

319
5 l a n d 52 (preschool form); 37 (elementary form); 25 (high school form); 70

3-pt. importance Fill in appropriate age

1,2 2

Attitudes Toward Parental Control of Children Attitudes Toward Child Behavior Parental Control Attitude Scale Parents' Inventory

Stogdill, 1936b

Approval of control and/or freedom Various child behaviors Control of children's activities Authority and Discipline

7-pt. agree/ disagree 7-pt. agree/ disagree 4-pt. agree/ disagree 3-pt. frequency or intensity and 2 open-ended questions 4-pt. agree/ disagree (a) True/false (b) 6-pt. frequency (c) 5 or 6 alternative multiple choice 1 1-pt. control/ freedom 5-pt. Likert scale 5-pt. agree/ disagree 4-pt. agree/ disagree 6-pt. frequency 5 alternative multiple choice 4-pt. agree/ disagree 7-pt. agree/ disagree 5-pt. agree/ disagree

1,2

Stogdill, 1936b Stott, 1940 Radke, 1946

99 30 127

2 2
None

Parent Attitude Survey (PAS) Untitled

Shoben, 1949

Harris et al.. 1950

Dominating, Ignoring, Possessive, Miscellaneous Authoritarian, Permissive, Rigidity, and 3 other subscales

85

(a) 36 (b)35 (c) 10

None

Untitled Infra-Family Attitudes Survey Parental Opinion Inventory Untitled ZAR Pregnancy Attitude Scale Parental Acceptance Scale Child Rearing Attitude Scale Traditional Family Ideology Scale (TFI) Untitled

Roy, 1950

Itkin, 1952 Shapiro, 1952 Mark, 1953 Zemlick & Watson, 1953 Porter, 1954 J. Block, 1955 Levinson & Huffman, 1955 Wiley, 1955

Authoritarian vs. Permissive Acceptance, Dominance, and View of own child Restrictive, Mixed, Analytical, Neutral Control, Warmth, Objectivity Rejection of pregnancy and motherhood Acceptance Restrictiveness vs. Permissiveness Democratic vs. autocratic orientation 8 subscales (e.g., Home Practices, Hostility, Oral Activities)

Unspecified

None

131 40 139 40 20 20 40

2
None None

2 2
None

1,2

160

PARENT CHILD-REARING ATTITUDES Table 1 (continued)

33

Instrument Parent Attitude Inventory (PAI) Parent Attitude Research Instrument (PARI-IV) Maternal Attitudes Scales

Study Leton, 1958

Content/subscales Unspecified

No. of items
118

Response scale Unspecified

Reliability information' None

Schaefer & Bell, 1958 Gildea et al., 1961 Winder & Rau, 1962 Hereford, 1963

Stanford Parent Attitude Questionnaire Parent Attitude Survey

Maternal Attitude Inventory Child Rearing Practices Report (CRPR) Manifest Rejection Index (MR) Untitled Maryland Parent Attitude Survey (MPAS) Untitled

Pitfield & Oppenheim, 1964 J. H. Block, 1965 Hurley, 1965 R. R. Sears, 1965 Pumroy, 1966

23 subscales (e.g.. Strictness, Marital Conflict) 5 subscales (e.g., Responsibility, Rejection) 27 scales (e.g., Affection, Restrictiveness, Reasoning, Self-Esteem) Confidence, Causation, Acceptance, Trust, Understanding 10 subscales (e.g., Overprotection, Rejection) 2 1 scales (e.g., Worry, Control, Express Affect) Acceptance vs. Rejection Permissiveness and Punitiveness Disciplinarian, Rejecting, Protective, Indulgent Attitudes about existing and desired sex differences Permissive vs. Restrictive Same and cross-sex behavior in children

115

4-pt. agree/ disagree 4-pt. agree/ disagree 4-pt. agree/ disagree 5-pt. agree/ disagree 5-pt agree/ disagree Q sort into 7-pt. most/least descriptive 5-pt. agree/ disagree 5-pt agree/ disagree Forced choice and 5 miscellaneous items (a) Multiple choice, (b) 5-pt. importance Unspecified Paired comparisons and multiple choice 3 different Likert scales Forced choice

1,2

17

1 2

491

75

50

91

30 79

None
2 1,2

90 paired items (a)40,(b) Unspecified

45 50

Untitled Sex-Role Attitude Test (SRAT)

Rothbart & Maccoby, 1966 Anders & Dayan, 1967 Lansky, 1967

None

None None

Parental Role Questionnaire (PRQ) Family Problems Scale III Maternal Attitude Scale (MAS-Form DD) Family Attitudes Measure (FAM)

Emmerich, 1969

Ernhart & Loevinger, 1969 Cohler et al., 1970 Delhees et al., 1970

Values, Means-Ends Beliefs, Means-Ends Capacities, Goals Authoritarianism (AFI) and 4 other clusters Assesses adaptive attitudes with 1 3 scales (e.g., Reciprocal Exchange) 24 attitudes assessed (e.g.. Assertiveness, Protectiveness)

140

209 paired items

233

6-pt. agree/ disagree in 4 formats (e.g., paired word choice, learning association task) 3-pt. likely/ unlikely/ uncertain 3-5 alternative multiple choice and 1 open-ended Unspecified

96

None

Use of Parental Authority

T. Gordon, 1970

Control, Punishments, and Reward Orientation toward discipline

40

Untitled

Gutelius, 1970

12

None

Parent Attitude Inquiry (PAD Child Rearing Practices Questionnaire (CRPQ) Child Behavior Inventory

Baumrind, 1971

Dielman et al., 1971 Hurley & Hohn,

1971

Authoritarianism, early maturity demands, and 7 other clusters 16 factors (e.g., Strict discipline, lack of selfconfidence) Overprotection, Manifest Rejection, Achievement Pressure

59

101

Unspecified

None

179

5-pt. agree/ disagree

(table continues)

34

GEORGE W. HOLDEN AND LEE A. EDWARDS

Table 1 (continued)
Instrument Parent Attitude Scale (PAT) Parent as a Teacher Inventory (PAAT) Parent-Attitude Survey Study
Li, 1973

Content/subscales Dominance, Obedience, Communication Creativity, Control, Frustration, TeachingLearning, Play Determinism, Acceptance, Confidence, and Discipline Values for child Attitudes toward sex-typed actions 19 subscales (e.g., Weaning, Sibling Relations) Traditional vs. developmental in orientation Child abuse proneness Coping, Emotional Needs; Expectations; and 2 other subscales Achievement, Obedience, Responsibility Training Warmth, Rejection, Aggression, Neglect

No. of items
20 50

Response scale 4-pt. agree/ disagree 4-pt agree/ disagree 5-pt. agree/ disagree Ranking 7-pt. like/dislike and 7-pt. importance (a) 5-pt. Likerttype, (b) Forced choice 5-pt. agree/ disagree 6-pt. Likert-type 7-pt. Likert-type

Reliability information' None

2

Strom & Johnson, 1974 Holtzmanetal., 1975 Holtzman et al., 1975 Atkinson & Endsley, 1976 Wagaw, 1976

68

None

Parent Trait Survey Untitled

15 14

None
1,2

Untitled

(a)174,(b) 84
36

Attitudes Toward Fathering Scale Downstate Childbearing Questionnaire Michigan Screening Profile of Parenting (MSPP) Untitled Parental AcceptanceRejection Questionnaire (PARQ) Untitled Untitled

Bigner, 1977

Gaines et al., 1978 Heifer etal., 1978 Hitchcock, 1978 Rohner et al., 1978

42 50

2 1

30 60

4-pt. agreement 4-pt. "almost never" to "almost always true of me" 5-pt. agree/ disagree 9-pt. agree/ disagree (a) Fill in the blank (b) 2 alternative forced choice 5-pt. agree/ disagree 4-pt. agree/ disagree 4-pt. Likert&2 alternative forced choice 6-pt. "descriptive of me" Q sort into 9 categories of perceptions of actual practices and ideal practices 6-pt. encourage/ discourage Unspecified

None
2

Maternal Developmental Expections and Childbearing Attitudes Survey (MDECAS) Child-Rearing Sex-Role Attitude Scale (CRSRAS) Untitled Prenatal Maternal Questionnaire Modified Child Rearing Practices Report NC-l58Q-Sort Inventory of Parenting Behaviors

Endsley et al., 1979 Falender& Mehrabian, 1980 T. M. Field etal., 1980

2 components of authoritarianism Pleasure, Arousal, Dominance (a) Knowledge of milestones, (b) Attitudes toward feeding, teaching. and discipline Traditional vs. Nontraditional Permissive vs. Restrictive, Directive Responsiveness and Flexibility Restrictiveness, Nurturance Physical, Intellectual, Social, and Emotional Development

16 46

1 2

(a) 8, (b) 13

None

Burge, 1981

28

Sheintuch & Lewin, 1981 Crockenberg & Smith, 1982 Rickel & Biasatti, 1982 Lawtonetal., 1983

40 34

None None

40 72

None

Ideal Child Scaleb

Paguio, 1983

Parenting Discrepancy Scale" (PDS) Parental Attitudes Toward Childrearing (PACR) Untitled

DeSalvo & Zurcher, 1984 Easterbrooks & Goldberg, 1984 Hock etal., 1984

Factors of Adjustment, Conforming, Creative, Negativistic Actual and ideal parenting attitudes, skills, and practices Encourage Independence, Strictness, Warmth, and Aggravation Exclusive maternal care, employment orientation

66

None

20

51

6-pt. agree/ disagree 5-pt. agree/ disagree

10

PARENT CHILD-REARING ATTITUDES Table 1 (continued)

35

Instrument Untitled

Study Keller etal., 1984

Content/subscales (a) Attitudes, (b) Beliefs, (c) Expectations, (d) Sources of Information

No. of items (a) 7, (b) 10, (c) 1 2, (d) 9

Response scale (a) Yes/no forced choice, (b) Open-ended, (c) Openended, (d) Yes/ no forced choice 5-pt. agree/ disagree 7-pt. agree/ disagree (a)Likerttype, (b) 4-pt. "believe in and want child to believe in" 9-pt. agree/ disagree own and partner's view 4 alternative multiple choice

Reliability information* None

Role of the Father (ROFQ) Maternal Expectations, Altitudes, and Beliefs (MEABI) Attitudes Toward Traditional Parental and Values

Palkovitz, 1984 Rickard et al.. 1984 Sacks & Donnenfeld, 1984

Importance of father for child 9 scales (e.g.. Need for Approval, Reaction to Deviant Behavior) (a) Traditional parenting, (b) values for child and self

15 67

None

1,2

(a) 1 7, (b) 7

None

Ideas about parenting

Cowan etal., 1985

Authoritarian Control, Child-Cemeredness, Permissive-Protective Degree of control toward child's emotional expressive behavior Categorical and perspectivistic thinking

56

Parent Attitude Toward Child Emotional Expressiveness Scale (PACES) Concepts of Development Questionnaire (CODQ) Parental Modernity Inventory (PM) Untitled Role Disposition Questionnaire Black Parental Attitudes Scale" Parental Locus of Control Scale (PLOC) Parental Beliefs Questionnaire Little Parenting Styles Scale

Saarni, 1985

20

None

Sameroff& Feil, 1985

20

Schaefer& Edgerton, 1985 Segal, 1985 Segal, 1985 Branch & Newcombe, 1986 Campisetal., 1986 Elias & Ubriaco, 1986 Little, 1986

Progressive and traditional factors Values in 6 areas (e.g., obedience, school) Parent-as-teacher Racial-Social Awareness in Child Rearing and 5 other subscales Efficacy, Child Control, Parent Control, Belief in Fate, Responsibility Importance of various influences on child's social competence 6 parenting styles (e.g., Rejecting, Overprotective, Overinduigent) 6 "distorted" beliefs: Ruination, Perfectionism, Approval, Obedience, Self-Blame, and Malicious Intent

30

4-pt. agree/ disagree (also in Q-sort format) 5-pt. agree/ disagree 6-category Q sort 5-pt. agree/ disagree Likert-type

1,2

30 24 75

None None

47

5-pt. agree/ disagree 5-pt. influence

Unspecified

None

53

6-pt. agree/ disagree

1,2

Family Beliefs Inventory (FBI)

Roehling& Robin, 1986

60

7-pt. agree/ disagree

Note- The maternal form of the instrument is described if it differs from the paternal form. a I - Test-retest data are available; 2 = internal consistency data are available. b The author of the scale was someone other than those cited.

tions designed to disclose the opinions of adults concerning the object of punishment, the types of child behaviors that should be punished, and the types of punishment to be used. Since then and through 1986, 82 other parental attitude questionnaires have appeared in English-language journals or books. As will be seen, a

number of questionnaires sample from distinct domains and thereby justify their existence. However, many instruments duplicate earlier efforts. A summary of the characteristics of the instruments and their content follows. Each instrument, along with a description of its format and content, can be found in Table 1.

36

GEORGE W. HOLDEN AND LEE A. EDWARDS Attitude Survey (PAS). The third-person format was selected because it avoided potential bias due to "confessions" of parents (which, he feared, could affect negatively the clinical relationship). Other instrument developers have concurred about the need to "avoid arousing self-conscious and defensive tendencies" (Loevinger & Sweet, 1961, p. 110). About three-quarters of the instruments have been written in the third person, although in recent years more instruments are being worded in the first person, following the lead of Radke (1946). As will be seen later, the decision to word items in the third person has contributed greatly to interpretation problems. Shoben made a second influential decision about the phrasing of items. Rather than presenting specific situations, which he feared would only result in the data becoming "stimulus bound," he worded his questionnaire in the form of cliches ("A child should be seen and not heard"), rationalizations ("A child should have strict discipline in order to develop a fine, strong character"), and truisms ("Children should have lots of parental supervision"). The majority of PCRAs reflect that level of generality. In stark contrast are a few surveys that clearly specify the behavior in question and the situation in which the behavior occurred. Such context-specific items usually appear in the form of a series of sentences organized into a short vignette. Ackerley (1935) was the first to do this; since then others have followed suit (e.g., Atkinson & Endsley, 1976; Gutelius, 1970; Harris etal., 1950). The last major instrument design decision concerns the type of response format to use. Preference for Likert-type response scales is strong; 68% of the surveys use that format exclusively, probably because of the ease of administration and analysis. Of those PCRAs using the Likert format, all but 20% of the instruments have agreement/disagreement response scales. In contrast to the popularity of the agreement ratings, no accord exists on the number of response points to use. Response scales range from 3 to 11 points (median and mode = 5). Likert-type scales continue to be the most popular response format for inclusion in new surveys or as a way to modify older instruments

As determined by the stated or inferred rationale, the majority of the instruments (57%) were developed for descriptive purposes, such as to identify attitudinal differences across cultures (Holtzman, Diaz-Guerrero, & Swartz, 1975; Keller, Miranda, & Gauda, 1984) or to discover fathers' attitudes about child rearing (Signer, 1977; Palkovitz, 1984). The next most common rationale involved theory testing (24% of the PCRAs). Instruments have been developed within the perspective of psychoanalytic theory and its derivatives (e.g., Cohler, Weiss, & Grunebaum, 1970), the authoritarian personality (Levinson & Huffman, 1955), and family systems (Roehling & Robin, 1986). Two other rationales have been provided for the development of instruments: the need for a clinical or applied tool (11%), such as a device to identify individuals at risk for child abuse (Gaines, Sandgrund, Green, & Power, 1978), and the desire for methodological improvements on previous surveys (9%). For example, one instrument (Pumroy, 1966) was designed explicitly to avoid contamination from social desirability effects, or the tendency to select a response solely because it gave a favorable picture of oneself. The questionnaires also differed greatly in how they were developed. Most instrument developers provide little information about the origins of the items, though some items were based on empirical observations or behavioral reports (J. H. Block, 1965; Porter, 1954), developed from the Thurstone approach (Ackerley, 1935; Koch, Dentler, Dysart, & Streit, 1934), derived from a series of studies involving item analyses (Schaefer & Bell, 1958), created on the basis of previously developed interviews or interview data (Dielman, Cattell, Lepper, & Rhoades, 1971; Keller et al., 1984; R. R. Sears, 1965; Winder & Rau, 1962), or borrowed from previously developed instruments (Cowan et al., 1985; Easterbrooks & Goldberg, 1984; Harris, Gough, & Martin, 1950; Holtzman et al., 1975; Hurley & Hohn, 1971;Leton, 1958; Pumroy, 1966;Stott, 1940). Despite their varied origins, the instruments often manifest a similar appearance.

Structure
Four basic ingredients of a questionnaire include the format of the question, the number and phrasing of the items, and the type of response elicited. Although a variety of question formats have been tried, including word associations (Laws, 1927), paired comparisons (Pumroy, 1966), fill-in the blanks (Ojemann, I935b), a memory test (Delhees, Cattell, & Sweney, 1970), and short vignettes (Ackerley, 1935), these efforts represent exceptions. The great majority of surveys use single sentence phrases depicting something about a parent or child to which the parent then makes a judgment. There is considerable variability concerning the number of items on the surveys, with a range of 10 to 491 items (median = 50 items; see Table 1). Less variance is found on the important design decision concerning how the items should be worded. The surveys developed in the 1930s and 1940s typically reflected either the influence of Thurstone's (Thurstone & Chave, 1929) or Likert's (1932) views on assessing attitudes. However, in the late 1940s, Edward Shoben (1949) became the authoritative reference. After considering various formats, Shoben opted for short statements in the third-person format for his Parent

with other formats (e.g., Rickel & Biasatti, 1982). A few other response formats were used, including Q sorts, multiple choice, ranking, fill-in the blanks, forced choice, or a mixture of formats. The Q-sort approach, as a method to control for social desirability effects, has been appearing more frequently over the past 5 years (Lawton et al., 1983; Sameroff & Feil, 1985; Segal, 1985).

Content
The content of the instruments will be reviewed in two ways. First, the types of subscales found in PCRAs, as labeled by the developers of the instruments, will be summarized. Then, the particular items that compose the subscales will be examined.

Subscales
The PCRAs tap a vast domain of parental attitudes; over 140 topics are sampled by the 83 instruments. The number of subscales per instrument varied widely (median = 3, range = 127), though almost half of the instruments assessed just one or two attitudes. The subscales can be divided into three categories

PARENT CHILD-REARING ATTITUDES Table 2 Definitions of Domains in Parent Social Cognition Commonly Assessed by Parent Child-Rearing Attitude Questionnaires With Examples of Items Domain Attitudes Definition An individual's predisposition, reaction to, or affective evaluation of the supposed facts about an object or situation are labeled attitudes. Thus, attitudes are a function of beliefs. Examples

37

Behavioral intentions

Beliefs

Expressing general orientations toward behavioral practices, or contingencies, or the willingness to act in harmony with one's beliefs are labeled as behavioral intentions. Ideas about facts or expectancies that could be, in principle, proved or disproved are classified as beliefs. These are synonymous with knowledge, judgments, conceptions, and sometimes perceptions. Two classes of parental beliefs are differentiated: descriptive and instrumental. Descriptive: Items that concern expectations about children, characteristics of boys and girls, developmental timetables, or other ideas about children or parents in general are descriptive beliefs. Stereotypes would fall under this category. Instrumental: Items that assess the repertoire of ideas about how to achieve given goals are instrumental beliefs. These beliefs are based principally on experience with children and often concern one's own parenting.

A good mother should shelter her child from life's little difficulties." I put the wishes of my mate before the wishes of mychild. b Taking care of baby is much more work than pleasure.' When I am angry with my child, I let him know it.b

Most children are toilet trained by 15 months of age." When a child is born he (she) already has a personality of his (her) own." You must always keep tight hold of baby during his bath for in a careless moment he might slip." I believe physical punishment to be the best way to discipline." Holding and caressing a baby when he (she) cries is good for him (her).' I find some of my greatest satisfactions in my child.6 It is a terribly frustrating task to care for a newborn infant, because he (she) can't let you know what he (she) needs.' Loyalty to parents comes before anything else.* I encourage my child to be independent of me.b Children should be raised so that everyone in the neighborhood feels they are good children.'

Self-perceptions

Items assessing parents' own reactions or feelings about parenting or their children are labeled selfperceptions.

Values

Items that assess abstract goals or a coherent set of attitudes to a class of stimuli are labeled values. These include long-term goals.

jVo/f. Superscripts identify the parent child-rearing attitude questionnaire from which the items were taken:a Parent Attitude Research Instrument (Schaefer & Bell, 1958);b Child Rearing Practices Report (J. H. Block, 1965);c Maternal Attitude Survey (Cohler et al., 1970).

concerning parents and their children. About 80% of the subscales focus predominantly on the orientations toward, thoughts about, or consequences of child-rearing practices. The subscales in this category range from acceptance and aggravation to warmth and weaning. The second category, comprising about 17% of the subscales, concerns parents' views about children in genera] or their own children. Examples of subscales concerning child characteristics or behavior include dependency, emotional health, fearfulness, and trustfulness. The third category is encountered infrequently on the surveys, but it deals with marital relations and includes subscales such as marital conflict and husbands' inconsiderateness (see Table 1). Despite the range of topics, certain subscales reappeared frequently. The most common subscales concern concepts related to how to control a young child. Subscales on about 20 instruments assess parental orientation to control, discipline, or punishment (e.g., "The most important thing children should learn is obedience to their parents"; Gildea, Glidewell, & Kantor, 1961); another 20 instruments contain similar subscales but are

labeled as identifying the controlling style of the parent in terms of authoritarian or permissive parenting ("Parents should punish small children when they use naughty words"; Ernhart & Loevinger, 1969). More than 10 different instruments contain subscales designed to reveal parents' orientation toward acceptance or rejection of children; subscales assessing attitudes toward sex roles, sex differences, or sexuality in children have been equally popular ("Only male children should be spanked"; Burge, 1981). Other subscales that have appeared in at least six instruments include parental overinvolvement or overprotection and parental attitudes toward the independence of children ("Children are being allowed too much freedom"; Koch et al., 1934). Given that the same construct is often measured by different instruments, it should be noted that the content of the subscales can differ dramatically. In the case of acceptance and rejection, there is little agreement about the nature of the construct or how it should be assessed. Some instruments attempt to tap parental acceptance or rejection by focusing on tangential paren-

38

GEORGE W. HOLDEN AND LEE A. EDWARDS instrumental beliefs is especially appropriate for parents. Descriptive beliefs refer to those about children or parents in general, whereas instrumental beliefs concern how one achieves particular goals. Parents hold a large number of beliefs concerning their children: Stolz (1967) identified nearly 5,000 beliefs based on her interviews of 78 parents. The behavioral component consists of "behavioral intentions," or the intention to respond in a particular way. Although some instruments are supposedly directed at "practices" (e.g., J. H. Block, 1965; Dielman et al., 1971), those items are typically too vague to be assessments of practices. To collect self-reports of parental practices, an instrument would have to include items directed at identifying the frequency of which a particular behavior occurred over a particular duration; none do so. Consequently, items directed at so-called parental practices are actually assessing generalized behavioral intentions. In addition to beliefs, affective evaluations (which will be labeled attitudes for simplicity's sake throughout this review), and behavioral intentions, two other elements of social cognition are commonly found in PCRAs. Values, sometimes used synonymously with attitudes (e.g., J. W. M. Whiting & Child, 1953), provide a useful distinction as a superordinate category (Kohn, 1977; Rheingold, 1973; Rokeach, 1979; Stolz, 1967). Unlike attitudes, values transcend the specifics of objects or situations (e.g., independence in a child), represent abstract goals (e.g., to lead a fulfilling life), or reflect a coherent set of attitudes to a class of stimuli (e.g., respect one's parents). The final term concerns parental "self-perceptions." These perceptions consist of parents' beliefs about their own parenting ability, reactions to the parenting role, or views about their relationships with their children. The preponderance of items in most PCRAs concern descriptive and instrumental beliefs. Next most often appear queries of attitudes and self-perceptions. Items directed at values and behavioral intentions are included less frequently. Depending on the instrument, many surveys as well as subscales include an undefined mixture of types of items. Relatively few questionnaires sample exclusively from one domain, such as beliefs (e.g., Elias & Ubriaco, 1986; Roehling & Robin, 1986), behavioral intentions (Lawton et al., 1983), or values (Holtzman et al., 1975; Segal, 1985).

tal beliefs about children in general, such as Hereford's (1963) item, "Children should be toilet trained at the earliest possible time." Other instruments try to assess the same domain more directly, by presenting items concerning parental self-perceptions ("Looking after children really demands too much of me"; Pitfield & Oppenheim, 1964) or having parents report on their behavior ("I am harsh with my child"; Rohner, Saavedra, & Granum, 1978). As is evident, the preponderance of subscales concern social development or social interactions. Though some subscales deal with emotional development or issues related to affect, very few address parental attitudes or beliefs concerning cognitive development (e.g., parental views on teaching or creativity in children). It is true that PCRAs have addressed an impressive number of topics in the domain of social development; unfortunately, the focus of many subscales has tended to be on problems or negative topics such as parental discipline or aggressiveness in children. PCRAs have not achieved a balanced sampling of the domains of parental attitudes.

Items
When the content of the items is examined, it is clear that the label "child-rearing attitude survey" is more nominal than accurate; attitude questions constitute only a portion of the items. Many items are directed toward beliefs, behavioral intentions, or self-perceptions. Though most instrument developers did not intentionally mingle the items assessing different cognitive domains, some researchers did. Strom and Slaughter (1978) included an amalgam of items because parents' "emotional and behavioral responses to their own parent-child relationship are a combination of present parenting experiences, value-laden expectations, and beliefs regarding child behavior" (p. 45). In an effort to clarify those cognitive domains that have been assessed, definitions of "attitude" and related concepts will follow, with the goal of establishing a standardized lexicon in this area. Although there is considerable dispute about what constitutes an attitude and how to define it, the reader is referred elsewhere for a discussion of those issues (e.g., Allport, 1935; Oskamp, 1977; McGuire, 1985;Symonds, 1927). The first distinction to be made, a common one in social psychology, is that attitudes can be subdivided into three areas: a cognitive or belief component, an affective or evaluative part, and a behavioral intention element (e.g., Ajzen & Fishbein, 1980; Oskamp, 1977). Two additional distinctions will be made involving values and self-perceptions. To clarify meanings and avoid the terminological confusion that is rampant in the area of parental social cognition, definitions of the different social cognitive elements are provided in Table 2, along with examples from three of the most frequently used PCRAs. To summarize Table 2, the term "attitude," under the tripartite definition, is generally recognized to refer to the affective evaluation of the favorableness or unfavorableness of an attitude object. Although unresolved issues remain with this division (e.g., Dawes & Smith, 1985), it will be adopted for heuristic purposes. "Beliefs" refers to the cognitive component of an attitude consisting of knowledge or ideas that are accepted as truth (Antill, 1987;Sigel, 1985b). Beliefs can be subdivided in various ways, but the differentiation by Stolz (1967) into descriptive and

Problems With Content

The result of this medley of items is a confounding of the elements of parental social cognition. Consequently, various problems are created for clarifying parental social cognition and its relation to child-rearing practices. First, there is reason to suspect that each cognitive element serves different functions and may relate to behavior somewhat differently. Beliefs, for example, form the foundation of attitudes and therefore may affect behavior less directly than attitudes (Ajzen & Fishbein, 1980). A second problem resulting from the failure to disentangle related yet distinct constructs is that some elements of parental social cognition are more relevant to particular domains of parenting than others. Attitudes about methods of discipline do not function in parallel with beliefs about how children learn or how they acquire gender identification. Because of the differences in how the elements interact and in turn relate to

PARENT CHILD-REARING ATTITUDES

39

behavior, a differentiation of the components of parental social cognition is essential. Factor-analytic techniques provide one way to separate some of these elements, as can be found with data from the Michigan Screening Profile of Parenting (MSPP; Heifer, Hoffmeister, & Schneider, 1978). Another principal problem concerns the ambiguity of items. This issue has long been recognized as a possible pitfall of childrearing attitude questionnaires (Anderson, 1931; Koch et al., 1934; C. H. Sears, 1899; Watson, 1933). Likert (1932), as a founding father of attitude questionnaires, was well aware of this potential problem. He admonished developers of surveys to (a) word items as clear, concise, and straightforward statements; (b) omit "double-barreled" or dual questions; and (c) remember that "above a l l . . . each statement must avoid every kind of ambiguity" (Likert, 1932, pp. 45-46). Likert's recommendations, though often neglected, have withstood the test of time (J. M. Converse & Presser, 1986). Ambiguity is enhanced by the common practice of phrasing items in the third-person format (see examples in Table 2). As a result, parents could respond in terms of "cultural norms, professional opinion, empirical facts, or beliefs about what is best for others, none of which may have anything to do with what the parent actually does with his own child" (Becker & Krug, 1965, p. 361). Confusion has also resulted from other variables not adequately considered, most notably the age of the child described by the questionnaire items. The majority of questionnaires do not specify the age of the child but present issues concerning toddlers or preschoolers. Some surveys, however, include items that span development issues from the transition to parenthood to beyond the preschooler period (e.g., Cohler et al., 1970; Schaefer & Bell, 1958)! The consequence of including a range of age-specific items is that parents are forced to retrospect about what they did and believed maybe years earlier or to project about what they will think or do in the future. A second age-related problem concerns the error that results from collecting data from samples of parents whose children's ages are not homogeneous. Two parents may have responded to a scale identically when their children were at the same age, but because they were sampled when their children were different ages, their responses were quite different. Behavioral intentions concerning punishment, independence, and other constructs that are mediated by the developmental level of the child are particularly at risk for this problem. Many investigators have been careful in controlling for the child's age (e.g., Lawton et al., 1983); others have not (e.g., Little, 1986). Remarkably, the only investigator who explicitly incorporated the age of the child into the design of his questionnaire was Ojemann (1935b), who developed three different forms describing children of different ages. In a similar fashion, a variety of other important contextual information has been omitted from the items that is likely to have a substantial effect on parental response. Prime variables include the setting (e.g., home vs. public), the parent's goals or intentions (e.g., to discipline the child or to maintain family harmony), the presence of others (father or siblings), and the quality of "ownness" (whether the child is their own or not). Each of these variables has been neglected in the pursuit of a tenuous objective: to identify the pervasive, global parenting attitude that transcends all variables.

Maybe due to the baldness of the items, the content of certain items stands out as antiquated. Many PCRAs still used during the 1980s include sexist assumptions and language ("Too many women forget that a mother's place is in the home"), outmoded concepts ("The 'Puritan' method of bringing up children is the best method"), or inapplicable questions ("What you read in books about a boy's being afraid of having his penis cut off is just nonsense"). A more subtle problem lies in the word selection. Words or phrases such as "breaking the will," "ruin," or "stunting a personality" are out of place today in most parents' phraseologies.

Continuity and Change in PCRAs

PCRAs, as a class of research stimuli, are characterized by a lack of change. Some of the oldest instruments (e.g., Koch et al., 1934) continue to be used today (Campis, Lyman, & PrenticeDunn, 1986). Similarly, many of the instruments developed over the past decade are indistinguishable in form or content from their 50-year-old predecessors. However, three subtle trends can be gleaned from examining recent instruments. First, context-specific items are appearing more frequently instead of generalizations. Of the 11 instruments developed in the last 2 years covered by this review, three instruments contain situation-specific items (Elias & Ubriaco, 1986; Roehling & Robin, 1986; Saarni, 1985). A second trend concerns the increasing differentiation of the parental social cognition domains. Although some early efforts at separating elements of parental social cognition can be found in Ackerley's (1935) distinction between attitudes and information and Emmerich's (1969) identification of both instrumental beliefs and values, most investigators made no such efforts. A few recent instruments have been developed to focus exclusively on one or two domains but provide only a limited or superficial assessment of the topic (e.g.. Keller et al., 1984; Rickard, Graziano, & Forehand, 1984; Sacks & Donnenfeld, 1984). The third trend is the consideration of new types of attitudes or beliefs. Examples include parental attitudes toward pleasure in children (Falender & Mehrabian, 1980), emotional expression in children (Saarni, 1985), atypical or "distorted" beliefs (Roehling & Robin, 1986), rearing children with racial awareness (Branch & Newcombe, 1986), attitudes about parental control over their children's development (Campis et al., 1986), and views on maternal employment (Hock, Gnezda, & McBride, 1984). Note that many of these new topics lie in the domain of parental self-perception. One new and distinctive instrument attempts to assess the level of Piagetian-type thinking parents use when reflecting on their children (Sameroff & Feil, 1985). Whether this novel approach will be successful for categorizing parents' thinking about their children awaits further tests. Though PCRAs have experienced relatively little modification over time, some investigators have taken great liberties in altering the instruments. The popular PARI has seen at least eight modifications, including a reduction in length (Camp & Morgan, 1984; Chorost, 1962; Cross &Kawash, 1968; Emmerich, 1969), a translation into a foreign language (Seth & Saksena, 1978), and modifications in unspecified ways (e.g., Fu et al., 1984). Mercifully for respondents, the 491-item survey developed by Winder and Rau (1962) has been shortened almost

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GEORGE W. HOLDEN AND LEE A. EDWARDS

by half in a recent study (Chandler, Wolf, Cook, & Dugovics, 1980). However, modifications of a survey raise the question of whether the psychometric properties (if known) have been maintained.

Test-Retest Reliability
Test-retest data reveal how consistently an individual responds to the same items over a short period of time. Though the retest method of establishing reliability is problematic because subjects may remember their earlier responses on the second administration, and thus the correlation between the two administrations may be erroneously high, the method is useful as an initial reliability assessment. As one psychometrician pointed out, "If a test does not correlate with itself when administered on two occasions, it is hopeless to seek other evidence of reliability and hopeless to employ the test in correlational studies" (Nunnally, 1978, p. 234). Published test-retest data are available for 21 of the instruments (Table 1). Interpreting the test-retest results is difficult because there has been little standardization of assessment procedures or, in two cases, correlations were not computed. For those reliability assessments that do report Pearson correlations, there is considerable variation with sample sizes (median = 63 subjects, range = 8-645) and intervals (median and mode = 4 weeks, range = 1-156). Given that no prescribed interval between testing exists, some researchers have used a 12-month interval to assess reliability (J. H. Block, 1965),' and others have conceived of the same time period as a suitable duration to examine continuity or change in parental attitudes (e.g., Davids & Holden, 1970; Ramey, Farran, & Campbell, 1979). Averaged across all studies and subscales, the mean test-retest correlation was .76. There is also little concurrence as to the sample composition for test-retest assessments. In five of the assessments, nonparents were used as subjects; their retest correlations averaged .79 (range = .67-.95). However, nonparents form an inappropriate sample to test the stability of parental attitudes because one can assume that nonparents' (i.e., undergraduate students) attitudes and beliefs about child rearing are less developed and less prone to change than are those of parents. Some support is provided by the 12 correlations involving only samples of parents; those coefficients averaged .74 (range = .61-.89).

Psychometric Issues
On the continuum of research methodologies from those closely related to the primary object of studyin this case, parental behaviorto the furthest removed, the PCRA lies at the far end (Lytton, 1971). For this reason and others, questionnaires in general, and parental questionnaires in particular, have sometimes been regarded with suspicion. John Anderson, in his methodology chapter of the first Handbook of Child Psychology, wrote, there is much distrust of the questionnaire. This is in part due to the fact that confusion exists in the minds of question makers and those who fill them out with reference to matters of opinion and matters of fact . . . It is subject to errors of memory, misunderstanding of terms, and mental sets imposed by the questions. In general, although the results may be suggestive, verification by other methods is necessary. (Anderson, 1931, p. 14) Over the next two editions of the handbook, spanning 23 years, Anderson saw no reason to change substantively those words. Cautions about the quality of parental self-report data were also prominent in the 1960s (Maccoby & Martin, 1983; Yarrow, 1963). Given the concern over questionnaire data and particularly parental self-reports, it is all the more important for the psychometric properties of PCRAs to be both documented and sound. Such has not been the case. Of the instruments reviewed, reliability data were found for just over half (59%), and only nine instruments have both principal types of reliabilitytest-retest and internal consistency (Table 1). In most cases, the reliability data were found with the original description of the instrument; however, in some cases where no psychometric data were provided (e.g., T. Gordon, 1970), other investigators have subsequently supplied such information (Flynn, 1979). Validity data are even more scarce; such data were found for only 43% of the instruments.'

Internal Consistency
The internal consistency of a scale provides an index of how well a set of items are able to assess one construct. Information about the internal consistency of the questionnaire was found

Reliability
The reliability of an instrument is determined usually by a test-retest assessment or an appraisal of the internal consistency. Ideally, both methods should be used, as each yields a different type of information. These two types of reliability provide an index of the amount of measurement error associated with an instrument. Because variance is increased by measurement errors, which in turn makes it more difficult to identify significant differences or relationships, using reliable instruments is especially important in correlational studies (McNemar, 1969). A third type of reliability is sometimes determined from the comparison of two or more assessments of the factor structure of the instrument. Only one study (Koch et al., 1934) used a fourth approach to assess an instrument's reliability: Two alternate, parallel forms were correlated.

for 45% of the instruments (Table 1). Split-half reliability, usually corrected by the Spearman-Brown Prophecy formula, averaged .87 over the 18 instruments with such information. Additional evidence indicating that nonparents may provide inflated reliability data was reported by Stogdill (1936b). Across his two instruments, the nonparents' split-half reliability averaged .89, whereas smaller samples of parents averaged .66. Given that the split-half reliability of an instrument may vary as a result of how items are divided, a better assessment of internal consistency is obtained with Cronbach's coefficient alpha (Nunnally, 1978), or the related KR-20 statistic (Kuder & Richardson, 1937). Since 1971 internal consistency has been determined predominantly with these two statistics. The overall aver-

Tables with the reliability and validity data are available from the first author.

PARENT CHILD-REARING ATTITUDES age for the 20 instruments reporting these types of consistency was .74 (median = .76, range = .5S-.92); only 6 instruments attained internal reliability levels at or above Nunnally's recommended .80 for basic research.

41

provide such information. When consistency is assessed by the preferred calculation of Cronbach's alpha, few instruments attain an adequate level of internal consistency. Given the sometimes low reliability coefficients and, in a few cases, variable factor structure assessments, caution should be exercised in assuming that an a priori subscale measures what it was designed to. The consequence of the tenuous reliability of many of the instruments means that relations between parental attitudes and whatever else is measured are underestimated. As a result, it is more difficult to find reliable relations or to establish the validity, a topic turned to next.

factor Structure Reliability

It has become a relatively common practice to factor analyze questionnaire data. Reports on the factor structure can be found on more than 11 instruments developed since I960, although there is only one instrument whose factor structure has received repeated scrutiny: the PARI. Because of the relatively large number of items, the popularity, and the longevity of the instrument, more than 10 investigations have tested its factor structure. Schaefer and Bell (1957) initially described five oblique factors based on a sample of 100 students. Subsequent samples with parents revealed three factors: authoritarian control, hostility-rejection, and democratic attitudes (Schaefer, 1961: Zuckerman, Ribback, Monashkin, & Norton, 1958). These three basic factors have been replicated with only minor differences in samples of clinically heterogeneous mothers, low income mothers, fathers, and college students. Sims and Paolucci (1975) identified 10 clusters on a modified PARI that differed from an earlier cluster analysis (Cross & Kawash, 1968), but the clusters are comparable to the three original factors. In contrast to those replications, some investigators (Beckwith, 1971: Wyer, 1965) have reportedly found other factor structures; small sample sizes or insufficient information preclude acceptance of those claims. The factor structures of three other instruments have also been tested with less consistent results. The structure of the Parent as a Teacher Inventory (Strom & Johnson, 1974) was originally described as having five 10-item factors. In subsequent work, the six factors identified bore little resemblance to the hypothesized ones (Thornburg, Ispa, Gray, & Ponder, 1983). Similarly, Cattell and his colleagues (Barton, Dielman, & Cattell, 1973) found a more complex factor structure on the Family Attitude Measure (FAM) than had been found in an earlier study (Delhees et'al., 1970).' With a second PCRA, Dielman, Barton, and Cattell (1973) replicated only about half of the factors they had identified previously.

Validity
Nunnally (1978) has proposed that "the degree to which it is necessary and difficult to validate measures of psychological variables is proportional to the degree to which the variable is concrete or abstract" (p. 95). This maxim holds for the validation of instruments to measure parental attitudes. To their credit, almost half of the developers of PCRAs have recognized the need to validate their surveys. However, the evidence is often less than compelling, as will be shown. For example, the evidence for the validity of an instrument sometimes appears as a significant correlation between two sets of measures, in the absence of any specific predictions (e.g., Shapiro, 1952). To another investigator, validity was manifested when three of five judges agreed on the ranking of items (Porter, 1954). After disregarding certain validity data that provided no such evidence, the available information was marshaled and organized under Messick's (1980) description of the kinds of validity. He differentiated three basic categories: content validity, criterion validity, and construct validity. Content validity, or the adequacy with which a domain is sampled, will not be discussed here for two reasons. First, the topic was discussed under the review of the content of the PCRAs. Moreover, when evidence for content validity is provided, it is essentially useless information: "Five expert judges examined and concurred on the content validity of the items" (DeSalvo & Zurcher, 1984, p. 10). Evidence is available, however, for both construct and criterion validity.

Construct Validity Summary of Reliability Assessments

Construct validity indicates that the instrument does, in fact, Insufficient attention has been devoted to determining the reliability of PCRAs; there is inadequate information with which to evaluate almost half of the instruments. A mere 11 % of the surveys have been subjected to both test-retest and internal consistency reliability assessments. Collecting both types of reliability information should not be considered optionaleach type provides important yet distinctive information. The quality of the reliability data, when available, is tempered by the frequent use of nonparents to assess the properties of instruments designed for use with parents. Test-retest data are further limited by the wide range of intervals between tests. With those qualifications, the available reliability information indicates PCRAs have, in general, marginally acceptable testretest correlations. The internal consistency, as measured by split-half reliability, is acceptable on most of the surveys that measure the particular psychological phenomena of interest. Three types of construct validity have been provided as evidence for the validity of PCRAs: convergent, discriminant, and population validity. Convergent validity. Evidence for convergent validity usually comes in the form of how well the measure coheres with other measures of the same construct. Given the number of PCRAs developed and the frequent use of certain types of subscales (e.g., authoritarian control and acceptance), all too few studies have determined the convergent validity of subscales from different questionnaires. The available evidence provides generally weak support for the convergent validity of the instruments. For example, G. F. Brody (1965) found four reliable correlations between the PARI and the Maryland Parent Attitude Survey (MPAS), including the Authoritarian and Disciplinar-

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GEORGE W. HOLDEN AND LEE A. EDWARDS

ian subscales, r(50) = .30, p < .05, though the Hostility-Rejection and the Rejecting subscales did not reach significance, r(50) = .26, p >*5. Although a few investigators have been more successful in finding relatively high associations between the predicted variables (Levinson & Huffman, 1955; Rohner et al., 1978), more often than not the correlations are nonsignificant, and some even fail to be trends (e.g., Campis et al., 198(>; Leton, 1958). Only one methodological study was located that compared the quality of data collected from questionnaires, interviews, and observations. Using a sample of 40 mothers of 4- and 5year-old children, R. R. Sears (1965) found that mothers' selfreports from a survey and interview correlated .53 across five variables. When two of those variables were correlated with ratings from observations of maternal punishment of aggression in the laboratory, the survey data were found to correlate more highly than the interview data. The survey's punitiveness scale correlated significantly with ratings of observed punishment (.31) and ratings of permissiveness (.40). The results provided more support for the survey than the interview method for reflecting behavior, but Sears concluded that a replication study was required. Such a study is still needed, more than 20 years later. Discriminant validity. Discriminant validity, indicating whether a measure differs from other distinct constructs, has been assessed rarely; this is probably a reflection of the lack of understanding about why one parental attitude should differ from another attitude or from another psychological construct. The evidence for discriminant validity has frequently consisted of finding that two or more subscales on an instrument do not correlate (Falender & Mehrabian, 1980; Rickard et al., 1984; Rohner et al., 1978). Though such analyses do provide an initial step, more convincing discrimination needs to be provided with the use of proven instruments differing on theoretical grounds. Population validity. Population validity refers to how well scores on a test generalize to different populations. No evidence exists on this topic; however, with varying degrees of completeness, relatively comprehensive normative data could be found for four of the instruments. Schaefer and Bell's (1958) initial normative population on the PAR! was a dubious one: It consisted of a total of 120 wives of military personnel who filled out the survey 1 to 4 days postpartum. Subsequently, others have collected more thorough normative information and identified how variables such as the age and sex of the child, or the parents' age, education, socioeconomic status, and marital status, can influence attitude scores (e.g., Leeper, Milo, & Collins, 1983; Mohan, 1981;Phelps, 1969). Other instruments that are accompanied with at least some normative data include the MPAS (Pumroy, 1966), the Maternal Attitude Survey (Cohler et al., 1970), and the Family Problems Scale (Ernhart & Loevinger, 1969). Ernhart and Loevinger (1969) made the most extensive efforts to establish norms for their instrument by administering it to 1,584 women of different backgrounds. Scores from about 400 men and women and a smaller sample of mothers of developmentally delayed children are available for the MPAS (Slough, Kogan, & Tyler, 1978?/.1" In genera], however, normative data are scarce; little is known about the response ranges for most of the surveys, how family

characteristics influence those responses, or whether the scores from one sample of subjects generalize to other groups. Criterion Validity Criterion validity concerns the relations between the instrument and something external to the instrument; validity data related to two subcategories of concurrent validity and one of predictive validity will be reviewed. Concurrent validity: Criterion groups. How well attitude surveys discriminate two or more groups of individuals of known differences has provided mixed results. Stogdill pioneered this approach by comparing the attitudes of parents with mental hygienists (Stogdill, 1931), child specialists (Stogdill, 1934), and psychologists and undergraduates (Stogdill, 1936b). Since that time, support for the validity of at least 19 other instruments has relied on differences between two or more groups. Often the selection of the criterion groups is made in the absence of a theoretical rationale for linking particular attitudes with particular groups of individuals. Group differences have provided an easy source of validity evidence, although the magnitude of the group differences is often quite small (e.g., T. M. Field, Widmayer, Stringer, & Ignatoff, 1980;Saarni, 1985). An early example of the lack of theoretical rationale can be found in the series of conflicting studies involving the assessment of the attitudes of mothers of schizophrenics or behaviordisturbed children; as such, they were flawed tests of the hypothesis that parental attitudes were causally linked to child outcome. Mark (1953), and to a lesser extent R. V. Freeman and Grayson (1955), discovered mothers of disturbed children to be more overpossessive, overprotective, restrictive, or passive than a comparison sample. But at least four subsequent investigations, with larger and better controlled samples, were unable to replicate those results (e.g., Pitneld & Oppenheim, 1964). Since that time, PCRAs have been used to discriminate various other clinical samples. For instance, particular surveys have been able to reveal that depressed or psychotic mothers have less adaptive child-rearing attitudes than a control group of mothers (Cohler, Grunebaum, Weiss, Hartman, & Gallant, 1976; Susman, Trickett, lannotti, Hollenbeck, & Zahn-Waxier, 1985); parents experiencing problems have a more external parental locus of control than parents not experiencing problems (Campis et al., 1986); and abusive mothers differ from nonabusers in their responses (Avison et al., 1986; Brunnquell, Crichton, & Egeland, 1981). PCRAs have also been effective in differentiating between parental attitudes of nonclinical populations. For example, individuals from different religious groups hold different child-rearing attitudes (Anders & Dayan, 1967; Levinson & Huffman, 1955); mothers who revolunteer for a psychological study tend to have more adaptive attitudes than those who do not (Cohler, Woolsey, Weiss, & Grunebaum, 1968); and fathers who scored high on a restrictive subscale differ in personality from permissive fathers (J. Block, 1955). One of the most consistent and robust findings with PCRAs concerns the ability of the instruments to discriminate parents from differing social classes and educational levels (e.g., Fu et al., 1984; Sheintuch & Lewin, 1981). In fact, the group differences reported in many studies using the PARI could be accounted for by differences in educa-

PARENT CHILD-REARING ATTITUDES

43

tional level, according to Becker and Krug (1965). Many studies have not controlled for educational status (e.g., Moran & O'Brien, 1984; Turner & Harris, 1984). The problem with differing education levels in respondents is that one does not know whether observed differences reflect previously existing parental attitudes or are simply artifacts of reactions to the wording of the questions. Becker and Krug (1965) concluded that both explanations may be accurate, but the necessary experimental manipulation has yet to be conducted. Despite the many studies reporting group differences, it is also true that results are sometimes the opposite of what was predicted. For example, Melnick and Hurley (1969) reported that abusive mothers had less rejecting attitudes toward their children than did a sample of control mothers. More commonly, predicted group differences have not always been found (e.g., Hitchcock, 1978;Staples*Smith, 1954). A second approach designed to establish the concurrent validity of PCRAs has been to examine the associations between parental attitude scores and child behavior. Most studies report little or no relation between maternal attitudes and assessments of child behavior or personality (e.g., G. F. Brody, 1969; Zunich, 1962) or parent ratings of the child (Leton, 1958; Robinson & Anderson, 1983), although there is some conflicting evidence (cf. Barton, Dielman, & Cattell, 1977; Read, 1945). A number of studies have compared parental attitudes with the incidence of children's behavior problems. Again, most studies find few or no relations, although there are exceptions (e.g., Rees & Wilborn, 1983). In the largest study conducted on this topic, Wi nder and Rau (1962) compared the sociometric status of 710 boys with their parents' attitudes. Out of 340 analyses of variance (ANOVAS) conducted, only 17% were significant at the .05 level or beyond. Post hoc explanations were then created to describe the pattern of results. Concurrent validity: Behavioral assessments. The single most important validity question is how well do responses on PCRAs correspond with parental behavior? To date, only a dozen studies have tested the links between parental behavior and attitudes as assessed by PCRAs. The first investigator to address this question (J. E. Gordon, 1957) arrived at an inauspicious conclusion: No relation was found between rankings of mothers based on 12 days of behavioral observations and their attitude scores on Shoben's (1949) PAS. Five studies have assessed the behavioral validity of the PARI. Zunich (1961) compared maternal attitudes with maternal behavior in the laboratory. Of the 272 comparisons made, only 12 correlations attained significance at the .05 levelfewer than would be expected by chance^'G. F. Brody (1965) compared maternal attitudes on the PARI and the MPAS with observations in a preschool. One out of 23 PARI but three out of four MPAS subscales were related to observed behavioral differences (at the .05 level); when the sample was reduced to extreme groups, four additional reliable differences were found with the PARI. A third study using the PAR] and behavioral observations yielded mixed results; three of six predicted correlations were found, as well as two correlations opposite the predicted direction (Mannino, Kisielewski, Kimbro, & Morgenstern, 1968). Others have gone into the home to find additional limited evidence for the behavioral validity of the PARI. Radin and Glasser (1972) observed mothers and found a negative relation-

ship between nurturant behavior and scores on the seven restrictive items on the PARI, r(52) = -.40, p < .01. A relation between assertive control on the PARI and two corresponding behavioral indices has also been reported (Beckwith, 1971). Evidence for some tenuous attitude-behavior links has been found with other instruments as well. The strongest demonstration of the correspondence between parental attitudes and behavior was identified by Tulkin and Cohler (1973). Rather than focus on attitudes related to authority and control, the MAS was used to assess "adaptive" attitudes including reciprocity and appropriate closeness. Home observations of 56 mothers with their 10-month-old infants were conducted for a total of 2 hours over a 2-day period. The five factors of the MAS were then correlated with 17 observed behaviors; 15 reliable correlations were found, median r(30) = .43, p < .05. Mothers who believed that promoting interaction with their children was important were observed to engage in more face-to-face interactions, to hold the child more, and to put the infant in the playpen for less time, for example. Interestingly, the same relationships did not hold with the working-class mothers: Only four significant correlations were found. The authors speculated that working-class mothers did not believe they could affect their children's development, and therefore were less likely to act on their beliefs. Among the other investigators who have examined attitudebehavior links, Baumrind (1971) found some relations between scores on her Parent Attitude Inquiry and parent behavior clusters derived from home observations, rs(146) = .17-.44. More recently, others have identified some relations between parental attitudes and behavior in the home (Rickard et al., 1984) or in the laboratory (Easterbrooks & Goldberg, 1984; Egeland & Farber, 1984: Endsley, Hutcherson, Garner, & Martin, 1979), although the significant correlations tend to be few and limited to one sex of parent or child. To summarize the information about concurrent validity, there is weak evidence indicating that self-reports on PCRAs are related to parental behavior. But it is also evident that this critical topic has received inadequate attention for three reasons. First, few investigators have attempted to bridge the attitude-behavior chasm. Fewer still have ventured into the home to observe parental behavior. Also, those researchers who have collected home observations have only sampled a small amount of behavior; error can also be attributed to limited samples of observational data. Third, the content of the global attitude surveys is often only distantly related to behavioral acts. To expect a one-to-one correspondence is unwarranted. Given those major limitations, the finding of relations between parental attitudes and behavior in some studies is noteworthy. Predictive validity. Predictive validity, strictly defined, refers to how one measurement taken at one point in time can predict something else, at a later time. Only one study has provided evidence for the predictive validity of a PCRA. Crockenberg and McCluskey (1986) reported that prenatal maternal responsiveness scores predicted maternal sensitivity in a behavioral assessment when children were 12 months old.

Summary of Validity Data

The validity data on the PCRAs, like the reliability data, suffer from insufficient evidence. When evidence is available,

44

GEORGE W. HOLDEN AND LEE A. EDWARDS spondents to differentiate between strongly/moderately/slightly agree or disagree with statements such as "I joke and play with my child." What does it mean to moderately agree with that item? Two interpretations are that the parent jokes and plays some of the time or that the parent believes that such activities are generally good to engage in with a child. The results are ambiguous and opaque because of the poor fit between item and response scale. The nature of responses given on Likert scales is beginning to receive critical scrutiny (e.g., Duncan & Stenbeck, 1987). Ironically, of all the potential sources of error on PCRAs, the prime suspectthe vague and ambiguous wording of items has not been subject to any empirical investigations. To rectify the oversight and to shed some light on whether the wording of items is a central problem for PCRAs, a methodological study was conducted. An Interview Study of Questionnaire Respondents This study was designed to elicit mothers' thoughts and reactions to some of the items from one PCRA. Three types of questions were addressed. First, a within-subjects question concerned the immediate test-retest reliability of the items. If the quality of the items was good and tapped stable attitudes, then the mothers should accurately recall their responses. Second, did mothers express confusion in responding to items about their child-rearing attitudes? Third, how much variability was there between the mothers in their interpretation of the items? More specifically, which parts of double-barreled questions were responded to, and did ambiguous and vague words lead to differing interpretations? In turn, did differences in interpretation result in different responses? Method
Forty-five mothers of young children (mean age = 29 months, range = 20-42) participated. The mothers, 23 of whom had one child, averaged 33 years of age (range = 26-40). If the mothers had two or more children, the youngest child was designated as the target child for the questions. All but two mothers had attended college; 13% held advanced degrees. Fifty-three percent of the women worked either partor full-time outside the home. One mother was divorced; the other women were married to men who typically were managers, small business owners, or professionals with a mean occupational score of 7.1 (SD= 1.6;Hollingshead, 1975). The Parental Attitudes Toward Childrearing questionnaire (PACR; tasterbrooks & Goldberg, 1984) was selected as the test instrument because it represents an exemplary parental attitude questionnaire. The structure, content, and length of the instrument reflects the standard design of PCRAs. Ratings are made on the common, Likert-type agree/ disagree response scale. Though the PACR conforms to many of the standard format features of PCRAs, it also represents an improvement because items were written in the first person, the items are gender inclusive, and there are no cliches or dated questions. Negatively phrased items were included to avoid acquiescence sets. In addition, the survey represented both the old and the new, as it was a recently developed instrument, but a number of the items were borrowed from two popular instruments: the Child Rearing Practices Report (CRPR; J. H. Block, 1965) and the MAS (Cohler et al., 1970). The questions from the PACR were programmed to run on a microcomputer to record response time. The mothers practiced first on another computer program to familiarize themselves with the equipment.

the data are often less than compelling. Most of the evidence, and the strongest body of evidence, consists of criterion group validity, though some of the studies failed to control for the effects of education. The few studies testing attitude-behavior links have enjoyed little success; this failure reflects, in part, the lack of correspondence between the attitudes assessed on the PCRA and the behaviors observed. Overall, the validity data are inadequate and suffer from a dearth of theoretical or conceptual rationales. The obvious implication of the unknown or poor validity of the instruments is that PCRAs cannot serve as useful measurement tools for assessing variations across parents. Sources of Low Psychometric Properties To date, a variety of sources of error have been identified with responses to PCRAs; such problems have been assumed to be a direct cause of the low reliability or poor validity. The best documented source of instrument error comes in the form of one or more "response sets." Acquiescence set (agreeing with oppositely worded statements), opposition set (disagreeing with all statements), and extreme set (selecting extreme responses) are considered among the most common problems. For example, the PARI has been shown to be somewhat susceptible to each response set, but it can be remediated easily by reversing the direction of some of the items (Schludermann & Schludermann, 1971, 1974, 1977; Zuckerman, 1959). Another response set that has been implicated as a source of error is social desirability. Although this set has been assumed to be operating with parents (e.g., Yarrow, 1963) and has motivated the development of various survey formats as alternatives to the Likert-type agree response scales, it is a problem not well understood. Social desirability is sometimes thought of as a personality characteristic and other times as an item characteristic (DeMaio, 1984). With the exception of a few isolated results, such as Sigcl's (1986) finding that the PARI and an assessment of social desirability loaded on a common factor, there has been no systematic work examining parents' survey responses and social desirability. The Likert-type scales provide yet another source of error. Different points on a rating scale, if labeled, are typically described by vague probability terms. One end of the scale might be represented with words such as "strongly disagree," "very unlikely," or "rarely" in contrast to words such as "always," "strongly agree," or "very likely" at the other end. If those terms are relatively clear, the middle points of a scale, where the majority of the responses fall, are much less clear and are differentiated by words such as "slightly disagree," "unlikely," or "agree moderately." Two types of concerns can be raised about responding to these vague probability terms. The first potential problem occurs with interindividual ratings. 'Budescu and Wallsten (1985), among others, have shown that probability phrases are interpreted differently across individuals: One person's "rarely" may be another's "sometimes." A second potential problem with Likert-type response scales concerns whether an individual is able to distinguish between the different points on the scale. The response scales may reflect a mismatch between the items and the rating scale, or at least present unmeaningful distinctions. For example, the Likert ratings used on one PCRA require re-

PARENT CHILD-REARING ATTITUDES Next, they responded to the computerized PACK by typing in a number from 1 to 6 corresponding to their level of agreement or disagreement to each item. Immediately after completing the survey, mothers were interviewed in a tape-recorded, semistructured interview. Ten of the 51 items were selected as the interview questions on the basis of their representativeness of different types of problems (e.g., double-barreled or vague). Mothers were asked what rating they had given each of the 10 questions and their definition, interpretation, or reaction to particular words and phrases. If they were unable to recall their exact numerical response but gave two responses, the average was used. Agreement was assessed by having a second coder independently code 20% of the transcripts. The mean rate of interrater reliability for perfect agreement was 92% (range = 85-95).

45

Results and Discussion Although the use of a microcomputer to present the PCRA was a nonstandard method, no mother mentioned that the computer affected or interfered with her performance. The average amount of time needed to respond to a question was 9.8 s (SD = 3.7, range = 2-64 s). Mothers completed the questionnaire, on average, in 8 min, 6 s (range = 5 min, 6 s to 12 min, 49 s). The economy of this method was demonstrated by the fact that, in well under 10 min, four different global attitudes were quantified by the instrument's subscales. The study's primary question was how well could the mothers recall their responses? This procedure was, admittedly, an adulterated assessment of test-retest reliability. The standard testretest procedure is designed to minimize or eliminate recall by including a 3- or 4-week interval between testing. In this study, recall was expected to aid the mothers in reporting more accurately their responses and thereby inflating the test-retest correlation. However, not one mother was completely accurate in recalling the 10 ratings she had just given about 15 min earlier; one mother was incorrect on all 10 of her responses. The average number of errors was 4.2; 62% of the errors were one point off. When computed as test-retest data, the Pearson correlations averaged .76 (SD = .20; median = .79), with a range of .08 to .98. Across all the subjects, some responses were recalled more accurately ("I punish my child by putting him/her off somewhere for awhile"; r[45] = .88) than others ("I let my child make many decisions for him/herself"; r[45] = .48). Both before and after recalling their responses, mothers were given an opportunity to comment on the questions. The first question all mothers were asked was whether they had any general reactions to the questionnaire. Twenty-four percent of the mothers gave no reaction. Of the mothers who did comment on the survey, 15% found it to be "easy" or "fun," but 82% had critical comments. The most common problems mentioned by four or more mothers were: (a) their response would be influenced by the situation; (b) they had never thought about the question before and had problems deciding how to answer; (c) they became confused by the response scale; (d) their thoughts about their other children interfered with their responses; and (e) the questions were too vague. Two mothers observed that they had to control their temptation to select the most socially desirable response. After recalling their ratings on each of the 10 questions, the mothers were asked how they had reacted to and interpreted each item. All of the mothers mentioned problems in interpret-

ing or responding to at least one question; one mother complained about eight of the items (M 3 items). The 133 critical comments could be reduced into four classes of problems associated with the semantics of the items, the level of specificity, the appropriateness of the questions for their children, and the difficulty in using the response scale. Confusion about the vague or ambiguous terminology or negative reactions to the wording of the items was among the most common comments. Twenty-two percent of the mothers commented about the vague wording of some of the items or the problem of which part of a "double-barreled" question to answer. As one mother reported, "I started kind of taking it [the question] two waysthe reason I was never good at the ORE and other tests like that. 1 always sat there and analyzed it until I messed it all up." More common were the reactions to particular words that elicited negative connotations. In particular, words such as "physical punishment," "spoil," and "strict rules" were objected to. As one mother said, "When I think of physical punishment, I think of something mad or bad.. . .If it had said 'I believe spanking to be the best. . . ,' I probably would have put strongly or moderately agree. It's just the wording, I guess, the way it sounds to me." By the end of the interview, approximately one third of the mothers had commented about one or more problems they had with vague wording, double-barreled questions, or negative reactions to some of the words. The inappropriateness of items formed another class of problems. Forty-seven percent of the mothers pointed out that at least one item was unsuitable for their children. The irrelevant item was a result of the target child's developmental level or temperament. For example, about half of the mothers of the children under age 3 had difficulty with the item, "I let my child make many decisions for him/herself" because "that's kind of a hard question with a 2-year-old because I don't know what would be considered many decisions for a child that age." Half of the multiparous mothers solved the problem of responding to an age-inappropriate question by thinking about their older children. For some mothers, their older children provided a comparison object for judging the target children, while others responded by substituting the older sibling. The lack of situational specificity in the items was a problem mentioned by 22% of the mothers. Because the context was unspecified, those mothers wanted to answer, "It depends." As one respondent mentioned about one such question (". . .my child is likely to ... break [something] . . . if I don't keep my eyes on him/her every moment"): "My house is childproofed, but I'm a nervous wreck in someone else's home. We've got friends with no children who have little glass things all over." The final class of problems concerned the use of the rating scale. Eighteen percent of the mothers reported difficulty in deciding how to answer a question; either they had not thought about the question before or they could not decide how to respond. Another type of problem was that one third of the mothers made a total of 19 wrong responses; all but one had reversed the scale. As one mother explained, after realizing she had responded at the wrong end of the scale, "Well, I was confused. I couldn't figure it outsometimes these disagrees and agrees mess me up." A second mother confessed that her reversal was a result of "going pretty fast." Six mothers mentioned various

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GEORGE W. HOLDEN AND LEE A. EDWARDS responses: 14 of the mothers said they had responded to the first part of the item listed above, another 18 mothers said the second part, and 13 reported both. However, when the mothers were divided into groups based on their interpretations, no statistically significant differences were found on their ratings of that item or the second double-barreled question.

other problems they had with interpreting or using the rating scale. Some mothers thought there should be a frequency rating available or a yes/no response to certain questions instead of the agree/disagree rating format. The cumulative result of those problems is errors in identifying true differences between parents. For example, ambiguous items can result in Type I and Type II errors. Evidence for Type II errors, or accepting the null hypothesis when it is false, was found during the interview. In conjunction with the item, "I talk to and reason with my child when he/she misbehaves," mothers were asked to estimate the percentage of time they did not talk to and reason with their children. When two groups were formed on the basis of those mothers who reportedly reasoned the most and the least, no significant statistical difference in their ratings emerged. The eight mothers who formed one group reported they reasoned in all but 5% of the time. In contrast, the nine mothers who formed the other group reported they did not use reasoning about one third of the time. Clearly, their ratings should have reflected this difference; they did not. More common than Type II errors were Type I errors, or rejecting the null hypothesis when it is in fact true. This problem was also the result of the vague and ambiguous wordings of the items: Individuals may interpret particular words in different ways or they may construe the focus of the question differently. Consequently, an item may elicit different responses from two individuals solely because the question was interpreted differently. For example, mothers' connotations of the phrase, "I tend to spoil my child," could be sorted into three classes of maternal behavior: The mothers were being too lenient, they were giving too much attention, or they were providing too many material goods. A trend was found indicating that maternal interpretations of the item were related to their ratings, f\2, 34) = 2.91, p .06. Inspection of the means revealed that mothers who operationalized "spoiling" as a result of their "lenient behavior" agreed less with it (M = 3.1) than did those who denned it as "providing too much attention" (M = 4.1). Differing interpretations of the focus of questions were also discovered. The sentence "I sometimes feel I am too involved with my child" does not specify the object of the sentence: Is a mother "too involved" for her own good or the child's? Mothers were asked who they considered to be the referentthemselves, their children, or both. The 44% of the mothers who interpreted the question in terms of themselves agreed with the item (M = 3.4) more than the 24% of the mothers who were thinking of both themselves and their children (M = 2.0), F(2, 44) = 4.04, p < .05. The remaining mothers, who were thinking about the question in terms of their children, fell in the middle (M = 2.4) and did not differ from either group as assessed by Bonferroni tests. Similarly, some mothers interpreted the item "I believe physical punishment to be the best way of disciplining" as a query about how frequently they used the technique, and not as directed at their attitude. Mothers who construed the item as a frequency question had rated it significantly higher (M = 2.6) than those who thought of the question as both a frequency and an attitude one (M = 1.3), F(2,42) = 4.94, p < .01. Mothers were also asked about which parts of two doublebarreled questions they had answered (e.g., "I find that toddlers act like they are the most important people in the house and are always demanding things"). Differences were found in their

Conclusions of Study
This is the first methodological study to examine mothers' interpretations of questions on a PCRA and the consequent effects on performance. The time needed to complete the questionnaire revealed the major reason why the questionnaires are so popular. Mothers on average needed only 8 min to fill out the PACR; the investigator then reaped four subscales. Although other surveys may require more time, such as 25 min for the 74-item MSPP (Heifer et al., 1978), or more than an hour for longer surveys, the PCRAs do provide a quick and easy method to collect data. Appealing as the ease of data collection is, the results from maternal interviews reveal a method saddled with an alarming amount of error. The most dramatic result was the only moderate "15 minute test-retest" reliability of .76. That correlation coefficient is identical to the overall test-retest average of the 21 instruments reviewed above. Three qualifications are in order concerning this nonstandard test-retest procedure. First, the survey was presented on a computer rather than on paper. Though not one mother suggested the presentation mode caused any problem, it was a departure from usual practice. Second, only about a fifth of the 51 questions from the PACR were selected; the items were not randomly selected but chosen because they were identified to be problematic for one reason or another. Third, the test-retest assessment, because of the short interval, was more of a recall procedure rather than a second assessment of attitudes. As a recall procedure, however, the correspondence between the two assessments should be increased (see Likert, 1932). None of those points depreciate the central finding that mothers, in general, could not accurately recall how they had just responded to a series of child-rearing attitude questions. The major causes for the inconsistency were confusion arising from vague wording, a mismatch between the questions and the experience of the mothers, the lack of situational specificity in the items, double questions, and difficulties in using the agree-disagree rating scale. In addition, the results indicate that by failing to control for differing characteristics of the motherchild dyads, other sources of error can be introduced to the data. Some investigators avoid this problem by including only primiparous mothers and carefully controlling for the age of the child (e.g., Easterbrooks & Goldberg, 1984), although both parity and child age variables are often left uncontrolled (e.g., Cohleretal., 1970). Given that the PACR was selected as a representative example of PCRAs, such problems are likely to be representative of PCRAs in general. This study clearly indicates that serious methodological limitations must be acknowledged with the use of PCRAs. Deficiencies in the construction of attitude questionnaires present a major limitation for the veridical assessment of parental attitudes. Attention is now turned to a second princi-

PARENT CHILD-REARING ATTITUDES flat source of problemsconceptual issues that have been ignored in the assessment of parental child-rearing attitudes.

47

dren, are considerably more complex. Child-rearing attitudes are manifold for at least two reasons: The attitudes concern interpersonal relations (Triandis, 1967), and the attitudes are likely to be highly differentiated given the rich knowledge base a parent has about the child (Schlegel & DiTecco, 1982). In fact, parents' attitudes toward and beliefs about their children may constitute a uniquely complex class of social cognition. Three reasons are proposed; each in itself adds intricacies. First, parents are ego-invested in their children (Yarrow, 1963), a quality that contributes to biases in how parents interpret and think about their children's behavior (Dix & Grusec, 1985). Thus, the attribute of "ownness" may function as a cognitive distinction for parents. Consistency in parenting and conformity in children are two examples of child-rearing attitudes that may be dichotomized depending on whether the attitude object is the parent's own child. Second, parents simultaneously have both a history of interactions and a future of expectations with their children. Current behavior may then be interpreted or evaluated under the influence of one or both considerations. Third, for a variety of reasons, the individual may have competing attitudes or thoughts about how to rear his or her children. For instance, a parent may well have to inhibit consciously certain responses learned from his or her own parents, because those actions now represent undesired parenting behavior. Such conflicting parental attitudes have been discussed by psychoanalysts under the rubric of unconscious meanings (Coleman, Kris, & Provence, !953;Horney, 1933; Zilboorg, 1932)andby psychologists from a social learning perspective (e.g., Francis & Fillmore, 1934). Each influence suggests that multidimensionality rather than unidimensionality characterizes a particular parental attitude. Rather than holding one unmitigated global attitude such as warmth or permissiveness, parents hold a series of interdependent attitudes about the same constructmediated by a variety of variables. Such differentiation and compound thoughts cannot be captured by a single scale score on a PCRA. Stolz (1967) has pointed out that "parents operate within a milieu of psychological pressures" (p. 278). Some of these pressures are the parent's situational or long-term goals, the conflict between values or attitudes, or the needs of other individuals. Depending on which pressure wins out by being weighed the most heavily, the corresponding attitude is accessed or dominates. In a similar vein, Holden and Ritchie (1988a) have argued that parental thoughts or attitudes are often characterized by conflict rather than harmony. These conflicts can be precipitated by external individuals or considerations (e.g., child-rearing advice from the mother-in-law, whether a mother of a newborn should resume work outside the home) or internal, conflicting parental values or attitudes. Such intra-individual conflicts may appear as a dilemma for the parent of a preschooler deliberating about whether to encourage sociability or teach wariness toward unfamiliar persons. Another parent may experience the conflict between valuing autonomy and independence in a child yet at the same time desiring obedience. Such dilemmas are pervasive in parenting and require flexibility and adaptability in parental thought and behavior. Even some attitude researchers have recognized these parental conflicts by having parents fill out a questionnaire twice to assess the discrepancy in beliefs about their actual versus ideal children or

Conceptual Issues
The quantification and interpretation of parental child-rearing attitudes raise a number of important conceptual issues. These issues can be organized around the assumptions on which PCRAs have been built. The effectiveness of parent attitude surveys lies on four untested and tenuous or even inaccurate assumptions: Parental global child-rearing attitudes are stable and coherent entities; PCRAs do indeed measure these attitudes; these attitudes directly map on to parental behavior; and parental influence is unidirectional and determines child outcome. Each of these assumptions will be addressed by discussing the structure of parental attitudes, attitude-behavior relations, and theoretical models of parent-child influences.

Structure of Parental Attitudes

The nature of parental child-rearing attitudes, as subjective psychological phenomena, is based on particular assumptions about their characteristics and the belief that parental attitudes are verbally mediated and therefore quantifiable with surveys. Four core presuppositions about the structure of parental childrearing attitudes are that the attitudes are preexisting, unidimensional, coherent, and stable.

Preexistence of Child-Rearing Attitudes

Fundamental to the assessment of attitudes is the assumption that the attitude existed before the researcher arrived. However, it is likely that many PCRAs have assessed superficial "nonattitudes" (P. E. Converse, 1970; Smith, 1984). Stated differently, parents can generate responses to questions, but their answers may simply be transient, "newly constructed beliefs" rather than preexisting ones (Sigel, 1986). Although it is true that parents have child-rearing values they hold dear (e.g., Kohn, 1977) and expound on beliefs about the ways in which they influence their children's development (Goodnow, 1984; S. A. Miller, 1988), there are many domains in which parents may not have constructed beliefs or developed evaluative views about child rearing. Prime candidates to elicit nonattitudes include items dealing with developmental issues not yet experienced, items not corresponding to the child's temperament or family configuration (e.g., Tearfulness or sibling relationships), or items presenting ideas that the parent may never have thought about (e.g., "Most parents believe that.. . ."). Not one PCRA included a response option of "no opinion"; such an option might have provided revealing data.

Unidimensionality of Child-Rearing Attitudes

Typically, investigators have conceptualized child-rearing attitudes as unidimensional and at times bipolar. Parental attitudes are reduced to scores of acceptance or rejection, warmth or hostility, or strictness or permissiveness. However, there is reason to believe that social attitudes, especially social attitudes in close relations such as those between parents and their chil-

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GEORGE W. HOLDEN AND LEE A. EDWARDS attitudes suggests plasticity, rather than fixity, is a prime attribute. Other investigators have recognized that attitudes are modified as a consequence of developmental change or changing characteristics of the child (Colernan et al., 1953) and may differ across children in a family (Homey, 1933; Symonds, 1949). Furthermore, children provide immediate (and often potent) feedback to parental behavior, indicating the effectiveness of particular practices or the veridicality of certain beliefs. Such information may well prompt most parents to reevaluate frequently their beliefs, attitudes, and practices. Patterson and Reid (1984) subscribed to such a view with the comment that "parents' attitudes, attributions, and the manner in which they combine and label the ongoing behavior of their children are continuously shaped by their day-to-day microsocial interchanges with their children" (p. 253). But just as parents and the construct of socialization have not typically been studied in a developmental way (Maccoby, 1984), neither have parental attitudes. Although a few investigators have found indications of continuity in parents' attitudes (e.g., Roberts, Block, & Block, 1984), other researchers have documented attitude change as a consequence of parturition (e.g., Zemlick & Watson, 1953) or a result of the passage of time (Hurley & Hohn, 1971). Systematic work has yet to be conducted. It is likely that some domains of parental social cognition, including certain attitudes, beliefs, self-perceptions, and behavioral intentions, are subject to marked change while other domains, such as values, are more characterized by stability; this remains an open question. Each of these points highlights the need to explicate the structure of parental attitudes. Different morphological indices to capture the structure of an attitude are beginning to be developed (e.g., Abelson, 1988; Fazio & Zanna, 1981). Some of the descriptive indices that appear to be useful in parental attitudes include organization, differentiation, complexity, centrality, and intensity (Schlegel & DiTecco, 1982; Schuman & Presser, 1981). Such an approach would reveal neglected but patently important properties of parental attitudes such as how strongly the attitude is held. Explicating the structure of attitudes will also help to reveal how resolution occurs with conflicting attitudes and how different attitudes are organized and related to each other. To summarize, it has been tacitly assumed that parents have developed a set of stable, unidimensional, and coherent childrearing attitudes. These assumptions, the foundations of PCRAs, have been questioned. Instead, it has been proposed that parental attitudes toward child rearing are characterized by multidimensionality, complexity, and, not infrequently, change. Even if parents do hold well-developed attitudes about child rearing, it is unlikely they could be assessed accurately with the decontextualized statements assessing global attitudes. The next important issue concerns how parental attitudes relate to behavior. It has often been assumed that parental attitudes reflect or at least guide behavior. Once again, those beliefs are suspect fora variety of reasons.

their actual versus ideal child-rearing practices (DeSalvo & Zurcher, 1984; Uwton, Schuler, Powell, & Madsen, 1984; Medinnus, 1963; Paguio, 1983). Such discrepancies, conflicts, or dilemmas are common attributes of parental thinking and are indicative of the complexity rather than unidimensionality in parental social cognition.

Coherence of Child-Rearing Attitudes

Another structural issue concerns the coherence of parental child-rearing attitudes. It has been taken for granted that in the hierarchy of attitudes, global attitudes encompass specific ones. Therefore, global or generalized attitudes with unspecified contextual constraints preempt the need to assess specific ones. To date, no evidence exists to support such a claim, although the belief has been around since the 1930s. The potent global attitudes of overprotection and rejection were assumed to pervade many facets of the parents' behavior (Levy, 1943) and, thus, whether the child faced rejection in one context or another was superfluous. A newer attitude, best described as "uninvolved" (Maccoby & Martin, 1983), could also be characterized as a pervasive global attitude. But again, when such an attitude is present, it is more representative of atypical than normative parenting. Most parents are not guided by such potent general evaluations of their children, and focusing exclusively on global attitudes in most research studies is therefore misguided. Global parental attitudes of the kind and variety assessed with PCR As are unlikely to have direct, diffuse behavioral manifestations in general. Attitudes such as warmth, control, and responsivity are more likely to be mediated by a variety of contextual considerations such as short-term goals, the presence of others, and parental mood. Consider the parent who readily endorses the statement "Children should be permitted to argue with their parents." Though a mother may believe in the principle of the statement, if her child's argumentative behavior failed to conform to the parent's circumscribed definition of when, where, and in what domain arguing is acceptable, the parent may rarely permit her child to argue. Thus, directing questions at global attitudes with the hope of tapping a coherent set of attitudes is most likely to result in misleading information. As Koch et al. (1934) noted, "instead of being guided by a broad philosophy or carefully considered generalizations, people think largely in terms of small segments of behavior and more or less specific situations" (p. 258).

Stability of Child-Rearing Attitudes

Even if parents have developed unidimensional and coherent attitudes about child rearing, it is unclear how stable or enduring such thoughts are. Given that attitudes are learned responses, formed through interactions with the environment (Sherif, 1980), there is reason to suspect change rather than stability characterizes many child-rearing attitudes (see Goodnow, 1988). As an early investigator into the topic wrote: "Attitudes are acquired and molded by a thousand subtle influences which begin to impinge upon the human individual from the moment of birth. And from the moment of birth, also, the tiny and helpless human infant becomes an energizer of attitudes in those about him" (Glueck, 1928, p. 724). This bidirectional view of

Attitudes and Behavior

Responses to PCRAs are commonly thought to provide a reflection of behavioral practices, at least by the investigators who

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49

employ the method. Based on the concurrent validity evidence reviewed, this proposition is clearly incorrect: One can be confident the measures from attitude surveys typically do not directly reflect parental behavior. Given the lack of behavioral validation, the use of PCRAs as a proxy for parental practices is a major misrepresentation. Nevertheless, data collected from PCRAs are frequently referred to as indicators of parental behavior (e.g., G. H. Brody, Stoneman, & MacKinnon, 1986; Fu et al., 1984; Gecas & Schwalbe, 1986; D. C. Jones, Rickel, & Smith, 1980; Roberts et al., 1984). That attitudes do not reflect behavior comes as no surprise to anyone who has considered the complex relations between attitudes and behavior. As Triandis (1967) wrote about social attitudes: "In view of the multidimensional nature of attitudes, it would appear naive to attempt to predict social behavior from the measurement of attitudes, utilizing only one attitude score. In fact, it appears necessary to obtain a number of scores to describe each of the components of attitude" (p. 266). PCRAs might be useful, as one index of social cognition, if they measured attitudes rather than an ill-defined potpourri of values, attitudes, beliefs, self-perceptions, and behavioral intentions. Work over the past 20 years into attitude-behavior relations has shown clearly that attitudes alone are insufficient for predicting behavior (e.g., Ajzen & Fishbein, 1977). On the other hand, that does not mean it is necessary to throw out all efforts directed at understanding how behavior is cognitively mediated. In fact, the most prominent model of attitude-behavior relations, Ajzen and Fishbein's (1980) Theory of Reasoned Action, has proven its utility in predicting certain types of behavior. The model is based on the assumption that behavior is ultimately determined by beliefs; however, there is not necessarily a direct link between beliefs and behavior. The theory assigns attitudes as only one of a set of elements of social cognition that influence behavior. Attitudes are hypothesized to be causally linked to behavior, but they operate within a system of beliefs about the attitude object, beliefs about social norms concerning the object, motivations to comply with those norms, and a weighting of the attitudes and norms. Only in conjunction do these elements serve to predict behavior. One outcome of the research into attitude-behavior relations is the finding that global or decontextualized attitudes are typically not useful in predicting behavior. Given that behavior is specific and occurs in a context, the attitudes that are useful for behavioral prediction must also be specific and placed within a context. For example, Manstead, Proffitt, and Smart (1983) have used the theory of reasoned action to demonstrate how specific attitudinal and belief questions can be used to predict mothers' infant feeding behavior. Attitudes toward infant feeding were needed to predict behavior, but so too were subjective norms and behavioral intentions, as revealed by a multiple regression analysis. Besides the failure to account for nonattitudinal elements of parental social cognition in the attitude-behavior equation, a second area of neglect has concerned what has been labeled the "definition of the situation." Fazio (1986) has argued that the immediate context plays a fundamental role in attitude-behavior relations. If an attitude is accessed from memory and activated, it then can serve to create a selective attention bias that influences how the attitude object is perceived. In conjunction

with beliefs about norms, the situation is then defined. The process of activating attitudes, which results in selective perception and contributes to how a situation is defined, may be especially appropriate to study in parent-child interactions. For example, two prominent attitudes that become activated for middle-class mothers in public settings, but presumably not at home, are the importance of keeping their children well-behaved and at the same time appearing to be a good parent. Mothers go to great lengths to behave in a manner consonant with those attitudes (Holden, 1983). Taken together, the work by Ajzen and Fishbein (1980) and Fazio (1986),highlights the inadequacies of PCRAs in providing an adequate data base to reflect parental behavior. Though both models are probably incomplete as yet (e.g., Bentler & Speckart, 1979), they demonstrate how other aspects of social cognition interact with attitudes and are necessary to predict behavior. Although not all parental actions can be classified as "reasoned action" or even reasonable action, and certain parental behaviors might be intuitive or automatic, there are many others that are governed by social cognition processes. It remains as an empirical question the extent to which parental behavior can be explicated through understanding the content and processes of parental social cognition. PCRAs and Theoretical Models of Parents The single most damning criticism of PCRAs may be their failure to reflect the current state of knowledge about parentchild relations. It is noteworthy that the questionnaires have gone essentially unchanged over the past half century, in the face of dramatic changes in conceptualizations of parent-child relations. Typically, the surveys portray children as generic, parents as trait-like and unthinking, and parent-child interactions as unidirectional and acontextual. The early conception of the role of parental attitudes in parent-child interactions was captured with the statement "parental attitudes. . .do a great deal of damage in the way of warping the development of childhood" (Richards, 1926, p. 226). Thus, parent attitudes were thought to directly determine parental behavior, which in turn determined child outcome. The possibility that child behavior influences parental behavior or attitudes (Bell & Harper, 1977) has rarely been acknowledged by consumers of PCRAs. But today it is well recognized that children's characteristics, such as age, sex, temperament, intention, and particular behavior, or the context in which the behavior occurs, all influence parental responses (e.g., Dix, Ruble, Grusec, & Nixon, 1986; Grusec & Kuczynski, 1980). The bidirection of the child's temperament and parental attitudes is a prime example of how child-rearing attitudes change as a result of characteristics of the child, although the topic has received only speculative comments to date (Goldsmith & Campos, 1985). To their credit, some investigators have conceptualized responses to PCRAs in a bidirectional or even transactional fashion: "Attitudes toward child-rearing are viewed as one index of mothers' adaptation to the developmental task of caring for a young child" (Cohler, Gallant, Grunebaum, Weiss, & Gamer, 1980, p. 32). The work of(Bugental and Shennum (1984), within a transactional framework, has illustrated how a mother's be-

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liefs about herself and children as well as her immediate perceptions of a child influence her behavior during an interaction with the child. In another transactional approach, Valsiner and Lightfoot (1987) have developed a model of the reasoning processes parents use in preventing children's injuries. Parental beliefs, which are based on past experience, interact with the present situational considerations and result in child-rearing decisions. Besides Bugental, Valsiner, and their colleagues, the preponderance of investigators maintain a unidirectional conceptualization of the relations between parental attitudes, behavior, and outcome. A recent illustration can be found in a correlational study testing whether maternal attitudes influenced the level of moral judgments in preschoolers (Moran & O'Brien, 1984). On a more general level, the exclusive focus on parental attitudes while neglecting other variables has impeded progress in understanding parental behavior. It is now generally appreciated that parental behavior is multiply determined (e.g., Stolz, 1967). Some of the many determinants are beginning to be included in theoretical models of parenting. Belsky (1984) posited that parental behavior is determined not only by parental personality (or attitudes) but also the individual's developmental history, marital relations, work status, social network, and child characteristics. Bacon and Ashmore (1986) developed a process model of parenting in which cognitive and affective structures (e.g., goals, beliefs, feelings), as well as cognitive processes (e.g., categorizing, decision making), are required to account for parental behavior. Recent attention on how the quality of marital relations can influence parenting (e.g., Goldberg & Easterbrooks, 1984) provides yet another example of the limitations inherent in a deterministic view of parental attitudes. In presenting models of parent-child influence, this discussion has focused on parents' social cognition. However, it should be mentioned that, as has been long recognized (Goldin, 1969; Stogdill, 1937), the children's perception of their parents also occupies an important role in the equation of parental influence. Though many questionnaires have been developed assessing children's beliefs about their parents' behavior or attitudes, those questionnaires share the limitations of PCRAs. Nevertheless, a comprehensive model of parent-child relations must also account for the role of the children's perceptions of their parents' behavior. Parental attitudes have occupied a prominent position in theoretical models of parental behavior for many years; it is unfortunate that they have commanded so much attention. As discussed earlier, given the ill-defined and amorphous nature of attitudes and problems with assessment instruments, they have been a difficult construct to measure accurately. Instead, other aspects of social cognition, ones that have important and immediate implications for behavior, could be studied more profitably. These include judgments and attributions, decision making, and problem solving. Parke (1978) has advocated that researchers adopt models and methods that acknowledge parents as thinking beings; child-rearing attitude surveys do nothing of the sort. Prospects One conclusion of this review is that PCRAs are outmoded: The questionnaire items are often out of date, the psychometric

propertiesof low to moderate magnitude at bestare indicative of some of their inherent problems, and they have not been adapted to new conceptualizations of attitude-behavior or parent-child relations. As one commentator remarked about an early PCRA, "it tends to be a sorry piece of work, but it must be given credit for pioneering into a wilderness which has not yet been cleared of obscuring foliage and impeding underbrush" (Shoben, 1949, p. 115). Those conclusions are equally applicable to the majority of the PCRAs developed since that time. Even one of the developers of the PARI has admitted that "other methods for studying parental behavior are probably more valid" (Schaefer, 1971, p. 141). PCRAs, in their current manifestation, have outlived their usefulness and should be retired from the repertoire of standard methodological tools. With that recommendation, one is reminded of Becker and Krug's (1965) unsuccessful attempt to stem the popularity of the PARI. Their conclusion may have gone unheeded because they failed to provide alternatives. It is clear psychologists cannotand should notdispense with the study of parental social cognition, much less parental self-reports. But a major house-cleaning is in order if veridical data are to be collected. Two types of recommendations are offered. For those who are not convinced of the need to relinquish PCRAs, suggestions are provided for the construction of new ones. For others who recognize the need for improved methods, reflecting more current conceptualizations of parents and social cognition, some options are presented. New PCRAs: Parental Social Cognition Instruments It may appear foolish to advocate the need for additional PCRAs when new instruments are now being published at a rate of more than six per year. To be sure, it will take more than a tune-up to transform child-rearing attitude questionnaires; major overhauls are needed so the surveys can be used to collect accurate data and serve useful functions. Foremost, new instruments can be used to disentangle the conceptual disorder found in the current research into parental social cognitions. Clear differentiations between the dimensions of values, attitudes, beliefs, self-perceptions, and behavioral intentions are necessary. Separate questionnaires or subscales focusing on distinct domains of parental social cognition should be constructed, as Ajzen and Fishbein (1980) recommended for the study of attitude-behavior relations. The new questionnaires should be relabeled parental social cognition instnrments (PSCs) in recognition of the need to investigate not only parental attitudes, but each element of social cognition thatimpinges on parental behavior. Currently, the focus on generic global attitudes has obscured the relations between global and specific attitudes, or the associations between values, beliefs, attitudes, behavioral intentions, and behavior. Antill (1987X for one, has demonstrated that it is indeed useful to differentiate between parental values and beliefs within the domain of sexrole development. He found that parents' sex-role values, in contrast to sex-role beliefs, were predictive of different reported child-rearing practices. The new PSCs would also be useful for readdressing old questions in more comprehensive ways. Consider the question of the agreement between mothers and fathers in their child-rearing

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attitudes. At least seven studies (e.g., J. H. Block, Block, & Morrison, 1981; Leton, 1958) have addressed that issue. Instead of arriving at an overall correlation or discrepancy score between the parents' attitude ratings, the question can be differentiated in what areas of values, beliefs, attitudes, and behavioral intentions do mothers and fathers agree or disagree. Such an approach can provide similarly more accurate information about intergenerational differences (Collier, Grunebaum, Weiss, & Moran, 1971; Radkc, 1946); differences due to ethnic, racial, or geographic location (Durrett et al.. 1975; Keller et al., 1984; Stott, 1940); or the stability and change i n parental social cognition (Hock & Lindamood, 1981; Roberts et al., 1984). Along with the improved questionnaires, different methods for analyzing the elements of parental social cognition need to be applied. The use of multidimensional scaling techniques, as is beginning to be done in developmental research (K. F. Miller, 1987) and even in a study of parental social cognition (Bacon & Ashmore, 1985), represents a promising new approach to capture more fully the complexities in parental thought. All the attention to parental attitudes has come at the expense of investigations into the many other cognitive activities that parents engage in. Those activities, providing a more proximate cause of behavior than attitudes, are only now beginning to be explicated. Models are being developed to capture the rich cognitive activity of parents, and studies are beginning to document how parents categorize child actions, anticipate misbehavior, form attributions, solve problems, and make decisions (e.g., Bacon & Ashmore, 1986; Dix et al., 1986; Goodnow. 1988; Holden, 1983, 1988; Sigel. 1985a; Valsiner & Lightfoot, 1987). Developing improved PCRAs or PSCs is feasible. The new surveys must (a) strictly adhere to basic rules of item construction, including no two-part questions and the use of clear, unambiguous language; (b) present items in the first person; (c) clearly specify the contexteven if it requires multiple sentences; and (d) demonstrate acceptable psychometric properties, with data collected from parents. More sophisticated design of the new PSCs is warranted, including attention to potential problems such as the order in which the questions are presented and, for multiple choice responses, the response order (see Schuman & Presser. 1981). Though Shoben (1949) dismissed as cumbersome the idea of using scenarios with alternative responses available or ratings, this approach has been used successfully by psychologists in both interviews (Grusec & Kuczynski, 1980; Hoffman & Saltzstein, 1967) and occasionally on questionnaires. Sigel (1986), among others, has advocated the use of vignettes as a way of combatting the error of decontextualized actions. This approach may not eliminate all ambiguity, but misinterpretations are greatly reduced. Normative data must also be collected on the instrument so that family and background variables, such as socioeconomic status, education, and age and sex of child, can be controlled for when necessary. More methodological studies comparing different instruments and evaluating their psychometric properties (e.g., Freese & Thoman, 1978; Walker, 1980) or comparing different methods of data collection (R. R. Sears, 1965) are needed. Those interested in developing new instruments can benefit from the work of those who have developed over 25 question-

naires for the study of a topic more narrow than parental attitudesthat of infant temperament (see Hubert, Wachs, PetersMartin, & Candour, 1982). From that set of instruments, Rothbart's (198h 1986) Infant Behavior Questionnaire (IBQ) provides a model of a carefully developed survey: It is behaviorally based, situation specific, and has established norms and good psychometric properties. Infant temperament is assessed through parental reports of the infant's behavior. For example, one item is "When falling asleep at night during the last week, how often did the baby show no fussing or crying?" The rating is then made on a 7-point scale using the meaningful labels such as the mid-point of "about half the time." The tone of this review has been largely critical. At the same time, there is no question that parental self-reports represent an indispensable source of information. Given that there are no alternatives to the use of self-report instruments for certain questions concerning parents and their children, and that observational methods have their own substantial limitations, the issue is how to maximize the quality of the information obtained from self-report devices. The continued use of parental questionnaires necessitates an increased understanding in constraints on accurate self-reports. For instance, there is ample evidence to indicate that parental recall memory is poor (e.g., McGraw & Molloy, 1941; Wenar & Coulter, 1962). Similarly, why should reports of certain cognitions, ones that may have never been consciously considered, be expected to be accurate (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977)? However, other self-report information, such as current, discrete actions, may be reported accurately. In a recent investigation, mothers were found to have a high degree of correspondence between their reports of their behavior in a public setting and their behavior observed a week earlierwhen the report concerned salient actions such as the use of power-assertive responses (Holden & Ritchie, 1988b). Besides the salient versus subtle distinction, certain betweensubjects variables such as background and personality variables may be additional sources of variance. For example, Baumrind (1971) commented on the individual differences in reaction to her questionnaire: "In the author's experience, the inquiry was most acceptable to moderately well-educated, conforming parents without high intellectual ambitions, and if the sample were limited to such parents the inquiry would be more useful" (p. 74). Buss's (1980) private self-consciousness variable is a good candidate as a mediator of accurate self-reports; those parents high in this personality attribute should be more aware of their own child-rearing behavior. Alternative Methods As psychologists search for methods to tease apart the complex social relations between parents and children, it is clear that parental attitude questionnaires, as presently manifested, are not the answer. However refined and psychometrically sound PCRAs become, the standard questionnaire format can never adequately assess parental social cognition, and much less parental behavior. Instead, substitutes are recommended to supersede the PCRAs or PSCs for most purposes. Technology has already begun to provide alternative methodologies to alleviate some of the problems associated with questionnaires. The use of videotaped scenes affords realistic stimuli that come as close

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as possible to providing actual behavior yet enabling the experimenter to maintain control over the stimuli. This approach, which undoubtedly reduces subject misunderstanding (Sigel, 1986), has only infrequently been used as a way of standardizing stimuli for eliciting parental responses (e.g., Stevens-Long, !973;Stollaketal., 1982). A second approach uses the unique capabilities of microcomputers to elicit parental responses in a way suggestive of an actual interaction. Labeled the "Computer-Presented Social Situations" (CPSS), this technique involves presenting commonly occurring child-rearing situations or problems in well-defined contexts (Holden, 1988). Given the interactive nature of the computer, the confidential responses elicited are likely more reflexive than reflective, and therefore may be more representative of the usual parental response. The technique allows for both examination of social cognition processes, such as problem solving, and a method to elicit self-reported behavioral intentions in well-defined situations. The computer approach also affords the capability of assessing the parent as a thinking individual, one who can process and evaluate information as well as arrive at decisions. Such capabilities are neglected with parental altitude questionnaires. Both the videotape and computer approaches offer alternative methods to assess aspects of parental social cognition that avoid some of the problems associated with PCRAs. Conclusion For over half a century, the use of PCRAs to assess parental characteristics has formed a prominent psychological paradigm. Based on the number of PCRAs located, it is only somewhat facetious to say that when investigators wanted to sample parental attitudes, they developed a new instrument. Consequently, few instruments have seen repeated use; replication studies are almost nonexistent. To paraphrase and echo the conclusion of a review on one parental attitude scale (Becker & Krug, 196^parental attitude questionnaires have been an economical first step to investigate uncharted areas, but difficulties inherent in them necessitate different approaches. Problems both in the design of the instruments and with how parental attitudes have been conceptualized provide too many sources of error to document accurately the extant variation among parents. It is advocated that PCRAs, in their current manifestation, be abandoned. For those who want to study parental child-rearing attitudes, new instruments should be developed following the considerations and guidelines provided in the preceding discussion. Furthermore, the study of attitudes should be conducted in conjunction with the study of other aspects of parental social cognition. Alternative approaches for assessing parental social cognition and behavioral intentions have been advocated through the use of videos and computers to present contextspecific stimuli. As this review has revealed, a substantial amount of effort has been devoted to the assessment of parental child-rearing attitudes for answering-the fundamental question of how parents influence their children's development. The seemingly expeditious route of sampling aggregate parental behavior through identifying global parental attitudes has proven to be

riddled with problems. Better methods and sharper conceptualizations of psychological constructs must be developed to evaluate the roles parents play as environmental forces in the drama of development. References
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Received August 31, 1987 Revision received October 17, 1988 Accepted November I, 1988