The International Parenting Survey: Rationale, Development, and Potential Applications

ABSTRACT

The quality of parent-child interactions and family relationships has a powerful influence on children’s development and well-being. The International Parenting Survey (IPS) is a brief, web-based survey developed to provide a cross-national, community-level, population snapshot of the experiences of parents related to raising children. The IPS was developed as a planning tool to assist policy makers and community agencies plan, implement, and evaluate parenting programs and as a tracking tool to evaluate parenting support programs in different countries. We report the preliminary psychometric properties of the IPS on various domains of measurement in an international sample of over 9,000 parents. Moderate to high reliabilities were obtained for all domains of measurement. High internal consistency reliabilities (α = .88–.97) were obtained for the domains of children’s behavior and emotional maladjustment, for parental self-efficacy, parental distress and parental beliefs. Moderate levels of reliabilities (α = .52–.83) were obtained for domains of parental consistency, coercive parenting, positive encouragements, and parent-child relationships. Overall, the measure appears to have satisfactory reliability justifying further psychometric validation studies in population level studies of parenting. Examples of uses of the IPS are described and directions for future research and policy explored.

KEYWORDS:

• Assessment and planning
• child adjustment
• child behavior
• parent experience
• parental preferences
• parenting support

Declaration of interest

The Parenting and Family Support Centre is partly funded by royalties stemming from published resources of the Triple P – Positive Parenting Program, which is developed and owned by The University of Queensland (UQ). Royalties are also distributed to the Faculty of Health and Behavioural Sciences at UQ and contributory authors of published Triple P resources. Triple P International (TPI) Pty Ltd is a private company licensed by UQ, to publish and disseminate Triple P worldwide. The authors of this report have no share or ownership of TPI. Drs. Morawska, Haslam, and Sanders have received royalties and Dr. Sanders has received consultancy fees from TPI. TPI had no involvement in the study design, collection, analysis or interpretation of data, or writing of this report. Drs. Morawska, Haslam, and Sanders are employees at UQ.

Notes

¹ Percentages may not add up due to the missing data on some demographic characteristics.