The French version of the coparenting inventory for parents and adolescents (CI-PA): psychometric properties and a cluster analytic approach

ABSTRACT

Coparenting refers to the way in which adults work together in their role as parents to meet the needs of their children. Over the past decades, there has been a considerable growth of empirical research on coparenting, including the development of self-report questionnaires. However, most available measures relied exclusively on parental self-reports and were designed for use with families with toddlers or preschoolers. The aim of this study was to examine the psychometric properties of the French version of the Coparenting Inventory for Parents and Adolescents (CI-PA) and to identify coparenting profiles in a sample of 312 families with adolescents. The three-factor structure was generally replicated by CFA. Cronbach's alphas and item-total correlations revealed that the CI-PA and its subscales (cooperation, conflict and triangulation) have reasonable to good internal consistency. Convergent and discriminant construct validity of the CI-PA was confirmed, using a confirmatory factor analysis approach to multitrait (i.e. coparenting dimensions) multimethod (i.e. different informants) design. Additionally, the associations between coparenting dimensions, parenting (i.e. responsiveness, autonomy-support, psychological control), and adolescents’ psychosocial adjustment (i.e. self-esteem and risk-taking) supported concurrent validity. Finally, cluster analysis identified three different profiles of coparenting in families with adolescents. Limitations and implications for future research are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Adolescence
• CI-PA
• coparenting
• multi-informant
• multitrait multimethod approach
• parents

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the adolescents and their parents who kindly volunteered to participate in the study. We thank the principals of the schools and the ‘Direction de l’Enseignement Obligatoire’ (DGEO) of the state of Vaud in Switzerland. We are also grateful to Marlene Barbosa for assistance with school contacts, recruitment organization and data collection and as well as Sophie Baudat, Vanessa Brumana, Kim Da Silva Fernandes, Saskia Degli-Antoni and Zoé Rosselet for assistance with data collection. Lastly, we would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In the literature, person-centered is generally used to designate pattern-based classification techniques. Given that the unit of the analyses in this study is at the family level (i.e. coparenting) we have preferred the adjective pattern-based rather than person-based to describe the classification techniques.

2 Percentage of parents working full time was not investigated.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation [grant number 100014_156155]. Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung.