Construction and validation of scale factors and attitudes associated with parenting of children with high-risk birth

Abstract

Background: High-risk birth is a public health problem that generates atypical parenting practices. This study aimed to identify these practices to construct and validate a scale to measure parenting factors and attitudes in children with high-risk birth parents. Methods: The instrument was applied to an intentional non-probabilistic sample of 701 parents of children with high-risk births (age range 17-64 years). The scale consists of 56 items, each with five Likert-type response options. Results: As a result of the factor analysis with Varimax rotation, the final version was divided into two subscales: factors and attitudes associated with parenting skills. In the first, with 36 items and six factors (low educational skills, overprotection, and permissive parenting, dissatisfaction with the parental role, stress in raising a child with a high-risk birth, tri-generational disapproval of the parental role, and positive support from the extended family), a Cronbach’s alpha value of 0.90 was obtained, explaining 53.16 of the variance. In the second subscale, with 30 items grouped in four factors (parenting beliefs, negative coping with high-risk birth, self-validation in parenting, and parental resilience to the experience of high-risk birth parenting), a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.82 was obtained, explaining 48.08 of the variance. Conclusions: We suggest that this scale be applied together with others that measure theoretically related variables.

Keywords

• Parenting. High-risk birth. Overprotection. Stress.