The Early Parenting Attitudes Questionnaire: Measuring Intuitive Theories of Parenting and Child Development
Parenting behaviors and decisions play an important role in determining children’s early environment. Are these behaviors driven by an intuitive theory of parenting – a coherent set of beliefs about child development and parent-child relationships? In exploratory work, we asked adults on Amazon Mechanical Turk to endorse a set of propositions about parenting and conducted exploratory factor analyses of their responses. Three distinct factors appeared in responses: an Affection and Attachment factor, an Early Learning factor, and a Rules and Respect factor. In an iterative process, we created a scale of items with subscales designed to measure these factors, which we call the Early Parenting Attitudes Questionnaire (EPAQ). We next conducted a series of studies with groups of parents (on Mechanical Turk and from the membership of a local museum) to estimate the validity of the new scale. We asked whether the predicted factor structure emerged from subsequent confirmatory factor analysis on a new sample, whether agreement with each subscale varied based on demographic factors, and whether intuitive theories predicted self-reported parenting behaviors. The present scale provides an instrument to assess attitudes about parenting and child development, facilitating of investigation and intervention on parenting behaviors.