Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Pediatrics and Parenting
Date Submitted: Jul 16, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Jul 20, 2018 - Sep 14, 2018
Date Accepted: Mar 30, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Advancing Optimal Development in Children: Examining the Construct Validity of a Parent Reflective Functioning Questionnaire
ABSTRACT
Background:
Parental reflective functioning (PRF) is the capacity parents have to understand their own mental states and those of their children's, as well as the influence of those mental states on behavior. Parents with greater capacity for PRF are more likely to foster secure attachment with their children. The Parental Development Interview (PDI) is a gold standard measure of PRF but is hampered by cost, training, and length of administration. The 18-item Parent Reflective Functioning Questionnaire (PRFQ-18) is a simpler option developed to capture 3 types of PRF: (a) pre-mentalizing, (b) parent’s certainty, and (c) interest and curiosity surrounding a child’s mental state. Objectives: We sought to examine the factor structure and select psychometric properties of the PRFQ in a sample of Canadian parents.
Methods:
We examined the factor structure and discriminant and construct validity of the PRFQ- 18 among 308 parents (Males=120; Females=186) across Canada who also completed online measures of perceived stress, parental coping Scale, parenting competence social support.
Results:
A confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) confirmed the hypothesized 3-factor structure of the PRFQ-18 providing evidence that the PRFQ-18 may be a useful and practical measure of PRF in Canadian adults and showed minor revisions may improve the suitability of the PRFQ-18 for assessing PRF.
Conclusions:
These results add support for the construct validity of the PRFQ-18.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.