Parental Warmth and Hostility - Subject Baseline

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

Related Construct

Family Relationships

Description of Measure

The Quality of Parental Relationships Inventory (Conger, Ge, Elder, Lorenz, & Simons, 1994) was adapted for this study to assess the affective tone of the parental-adolescent relationship. Items from the measure tap parental warmth - mother (e.g., "How often does your mother let you know she really cares about you?"), parental hostility - mother (e.g., "How often does your mother get angry at you?"), parental warmth - father (e.g., "How often does your father tell you he loves you?"), and parental hostility - father (e.g., "How often does your father throw things at you?"). The scale contains 42 items (21 to assess the maternal relationship and 21 to assess the paternal relationship) to which participants respond on a 4- point Likert scale ranging from "Always" to "Never". Items were reversed coded to generate the composite scores. Higher scores on the warmth scale indicate a more supportive and nurturing parental relationship. Higher scores on the hostility scale indicate a more hostile relationship.

Confirmatory factor analysis was performed at the baseline time-point for the overall scale and for each subscale noted below. The values found in this analysis are as follows:

A four factor model was fit to the overall scale - NFI: .78; NNFI: .82; CFI: .83; RMSEA: .06
Parent Hostility - Mother (alpha: .85; NFI: .73; NNFI: .69; CFI: .74; RMSEA: .09)
Parent Hostility - Father (alpha: .88; NFI: .69; NNFI: .65; CFI: .71; RMSEA: .099)
Parent Warmth - Mother (alpha: .92; NFI: .95; NNFI: .94; CFI: .95; RMSEA: .08)
Parent Warmth - Father (alpha: .95; NFI: .96; NNFI: .95; CFI: .96; RMSEA: .11)

These results indicate that the scales for Warmth - Mother and for Warmth - Father have reasonably acceptable fit to the data. The scales for Hostility - Mother and Hostility - Father, however, should be used with much more caution.

Four composite scores are generated:

Parent Warmth - Mother [s0mawarm]; mean of 9 items, 7 must contain valid data
Parent Hostility - Mother [s0mahotl]; mean of 12 items, 9 must contain valid data
Parent Warmth - Father [s0pawarm]; mean of 9 items, 7 must contain valid data
Parent Hostility- Father [s0pahotl]; mean of 12 items, 9 must contain valid data

Data Issues

The parent of focus in this measure can be any adult responsible for raising the subject. This is not limited to the biological mother and father.
In interview versions 01.01 through 01.03, this measure was administered to everyone. Starting with version 01.04, this measure was only received if, in the past six months, they lived with an adult who was responsible for raising them.

References

Conger, R., Ge, X., Elder, G., Jr. Lorenz, F., and Simons, R. (1994). Economic stress, coercive family process, and developmental problems of adolescents. Child Development, 65, 541-561.