Parental Monitoring - Subject Baseline
This measure appears in the following time-points: Baseline.
Related Construct
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). Preliminary questions establish the presence of a single individual (X) who is primarily responsible for the youth. The respondent's answers to several items about their current living situation, specifically whether they live with the identified caretaker, 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 does X know about how you spend your 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 person identified as their primary caretaker, they are asked these questions. If the youth lives with the primary caretaker, four additional items are asked to assess parental monitoring of the youth's behavior (e.g. How often do you have a set time to be home on weekend nights?). These are answered on a 4-point Likert scale which ranges from "never" to "always".
Confirmatory Factor Analyses were conducted fitting a two factor solution with the below subscale scores to the data, for the baseline data set and each of the follow-up data sets through the 24 month follow-up interviews. These results indicated that a satisfactory fit to each data set (CFI greater than .92 and RMSEA less than .08) could generally be achieved using all of the nine items in the model and allowing for a correlated error term.
Two computed scores are available:
- Parental knowledge [s0paknow]; mean of items s0pmonit to s0pmoni5. Data in four of the five items is required to receive a computed mean.
- Parental monitoring [s0parmnt]; mean of items s0pmoni7 to s0pmon10; only available if subject lives with supervising adult. Data in three of the four items is required.
The following individual item is also available for this measure:
- Relationship of person who is primarily responsible for the subject [s0parmon]
Data Issues
- For interview versions 01.01 through 01.04, if s0pmonit (how much does x know who you spend time with) is 97 (NA - no one is responsible for me), then the rest of the measure is skipped.
- Starting with version 01.05, s0parmon was added to the interview. If this has a value of 97 (NA), then the rest of the measure is skipped.
- Items s0pmoni7 through s0pmoni10 were only asked if the subject reported living with their primary caregiver (s0pmoni6 = yes).
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.