Assessment of parenting practices in families of elementary school-age children

Abstract

Tested multimethod and multi-informant assessment of parenting practices in families of clinic-referred children between the ages of 6 and 13 (n = 124) and in families of community volunteer children (n = 36) who were comparable to the clinic group on age and sex of child, family ethnicity, and parental marital status. In general, children's report was not useful for assessing the parenting constructs using either a global report format or multiple telephone interviews. This was especially true for younger children (below age 9) and for child report on the telephone interviews, whereby children tended to respond using a consistent response set. In contrast, both assessment formats for obtaining parental report showed good utility. Reports from parents (in most cases the child's mother) generally were not strongly associated with measures of socially desirable responding, and parental report showed expected age trends and expected associations with socioeconomic status. Most important, both parental report formats were useful for differentiating families of children with disruptive behavior disorders (defined by teacher report alone) from families of normal volunteer children screened for disruptive behavior disorders.