Parental Monitoring - Subject Follow-up

This measure appears in the following time-points: Follow06, Follow12, Follow18, Follow24, Follow30, Follow36, Follow48, Follow60, Follow72, Follow84.

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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). 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 [S#PAKNOW]; mean of items S#PMONIT1 to S#PMONIT5. Data must be contained in four of the five items in order to receive a computed mean.
Parental monitoring [S#PARMNT]; mean of items S#PMONIT6 to S#PMONIT9; only available if subject lives with supervising adult. Data in three of the four items is required.

The living calendar offers variables that supplement this measure. For example, additional items that provide information on the subject's primary caregiver as well as computed variables regarding their caregiver can be found in the living calendar. Please refer to the living calendar codebook for a complete listing of the variables we have available.

Data Issues

This measure is only administered if the subject had a primary caregiver during the recall period (established in variable s#homeq_priadr). Refer to the living calendar for a complete explanation of this variable.
Items s#pmonit6 through s#pmonit9 were only asked if the subject reported living with their primary caregiver (s#pmonit_pmlive = yes).
Some cases are missing data for this measure as a result of data cleaning changes done in order to correct an interviewer mistake. Cases with this issue are noted with a missing value code of -800.

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.