Development of a Measure to Assess Parents’ Readiness to Change Parenting Behaviours

Abstract

There has been increasing attention given to ways to extend the reach of parenting supports to benefit as many parents as possible. Public health-style information campaigns are a relatively new and promising way of reaching parents. However, the impact of public health-style supports such as media campaigns can be difficult to measure. Numerous public health efforts have benefitted from the application of frameworks that measure readiness to change, a construct that can be measured in the absence of overt behaviour change. According to the Stages of Change model, individuals can be categorized in terms of their readiness to engage in health-related behaviours. However, the applicability of the Stages of Change model to parenting is not well understood. In order to assess the applicability of the Stages of Change model to parenting, I followed best practices in test development to create a measure of readiness to change parenting behaviours. The Parent Assessment of Readiness to Change (PARC) is a 20-item measure of readiness to change parenting behaviours that includes four subscales: Precontemplation, Contemplation, Action, and Maintenance. In the first study, experts were consulted on a preliminary item pool. In the next study, the PARC was pilot tested with a small group of parents. In a third study with a community sample of 381 Canadian parents, I found evidence of internal consistency, convergent validity, discriminant validity, and the hypothesized factor structure. Subsequently, I used confirmatory factor analysis with data from a new sample of 384 Canadian parents to replicate the original four-factor structure. I also further assessed the PARC’s factor structure by conducting analyses with a combined sample that included data from both of the large samples I collected (combined N = 765). The four-factor structure was consistent across parent gender and child age categories. The research conducted on the PARC as part of this dissertation represents a novel application of the four-factor Stages of Change model to parenting behaviours among community parents. My findings suggest that the PARC is a measure with initial evidence of sound psychometric properties that may be useful in research on parents involved in a wide range of parenting programs.