Parental Monitoring - Collateral Baseline

This measure appears in the following time-points: Collat_baseline.

Related Construct

Family Relationships

Description of Measure

The Parental Monitoring inventory (Steinberg, Dornbusch, & Darling, 1992) was adapted for this study to assess parenting practices related to supervision of the adolescent (i.e. study participant). The collateral reporter answers to several items about their current living situation, specifically whether they live with the subject, which establishes the skip pattern followed in the parental monitoring items. The scale is composed of 9 items. Five items assess parental knowledge (e.g. How much do you know about how X spends his/her free time) and are answered on a 4-point Likert scale ranging from "doesn't know at all" to "knows everything". Even if a youth does not live with the collateral reporter, they are asked these questions. If the youth lives with the collateral reporter, four additional items are asked to assess parental monitoring of the youth's behavior (e.g. How often do you have a set time at which X has to be home on weekend nights?). These are answered on a 4-point Likert scale which ranges from "never" to "always".

Two computed scores are available:

Parental knowledge [c0paknow]; mean of five items. Four are required to have valid data in order to receive a computed mean.
Parental monitoring [c0parmnt]; mean of three items. All three are required to have valid data.

Both of these items are only computed if the collateral reporter has lived with the subject at some point in the last six months, and if the collateral is the subject's biological father, biological mother, biological grandmother, biological grandfather, stepfather, stepmother, adoptive father, adoptive mother, live-in boyfriend/girlfriend, foster mother, foster father, or other relative.

The following individual item is also available:

Whether the collateral reporter lives with the subject [C0_ColRes]

Data Issues

Both the monitoring and knowledge scores are only computed for certain relationship types (as noted above) and if the collateral lived with the subject during the previous six months. This differs from how the items are computed at baseline.

At subject baseline, the knowledge item is computed for all subjects that have a primary caregiver (independent of both the relationship type of the caregiver as well as their living situation with the subject).
At subject baseline, the monitoring item is computed only if the primary caregiver lived with the subject (again, this is independent of the relationship of the primary caregiver to the subject).

Additionally, the parental monitoring score at collateral is computed as the mean of three items, while the subject baseline uses four items. Item 7 (How often do you have a set time at which X has to be home on school or work nights) is excluded from the collateral computation but is included in the subject baseline version.

References

Steinberg, L, Dornbusch, S, and Darling, N. (1992). Impact of parenting practices on adolescent achievement. Authoritative parenting, school involvement, and encouragement to succeed. Child Development, 63, 1266-1281.