About this srcd poster session

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Panel information
Panel 14. Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Abstract

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Despite a consensus on the nurturing dimension of authoritative parenting, there are a wide range of viewpoints about the controlling dimension. Baumrind (2012, 2013) argued that confrontive control was an essential part of authoritative parenting, distinct from coercive control. Other research has supported behavioral control as opposed to other types of control, but most measures of behavioral control have been limited to monitoring. One problem is that authoritative parents prefer to respond to discipline problems with verbal resolutions (e.g., mutual negotiation), resorting to negative disciplinary consequences only when children refuse to cooperate with their preferred verbal resolutions. Then most measures of disciplinary control will make authoritative parents look similar to permissive parents with cooperative children and similar to authoritarian parents on confrontive control (but not coercive control) with oppositional children. An international team studying correlates of parental burnout (Roskam & Mikolajczak, 2023) developed a new measure of behavioral control that (1) accounts for child cooperativeness and (2) distinguishes confrontive control from coercive control. This poster summarizes initial psychometric data of these measures. Child cooperativeness is incorporated into stem questions (e.g., “If my children misbehave persistently or defiantly, I punish them”), followed by a checklist of punishments considered confrontive (e.g., “By asking them . . . to make amends”) or coercive (e.g., “By shaking, hurting, or physically correcting them”).

The data are from Finland and France, part of the International Investigation of Parental Burnout (IIPB) Study 3, led by Isabelle Roskam. The sample consisted of 2,267 parents of 2- to 17-year-olds. Exploratory factor analyses supported two factors of Confrontive Control and two factors of Coercive Control. Those items were then analyzed together in a composite exploratory factor analysis. At each stage, some Coercive Control items had to be dropped due to low endorsement (e.g., 1%).
The results of the four-factor solution are shown in Table 1. The first Confrontive Discipline factor was labeled Back-Up Discipline. Its items described negative disciplinary consequences that were administered only for continuing defiance, usually after clarifying rules and trying verbal resolutions (coefficient alpha = .80). The second Confrontive Discipline factor was called Compliance Rationale. The highest loading items indicated that the rationale for requiring children to treat parents obediently and respectfully was for their welfare. (The third item indicated a desire for children to understand why the parents insisted on appropriate behavior; alpha = .44 ). The first factor for Coercive Discipline was called Parent-Oriented; its items indicated that the parent disciplined children for parent-oriented motivations, not for the child’s welfare (alpha = .55). The remaining factor for Coercive Discipline was labeled Punitive Authority. Its items indicated that parents punished their children for any misbehavior, because they were the authority with opinions superior to their children’s (alpha = .44).
The next steps in the coming weeks include (1) using Item Response Theory to evaluate the item characteristics further and (2) testing construct validity (e.g., correlations with the most obvious variables). We will also explore ways to enhance the internal consistency of the latter three factors.

Author information

Author	Role
Dr. Robert E. Larzelere, Ph.D., Oklahoma State University	Presenting author
Hua Lin, Oklahoma State University	Non-presenting author
Kaisa Aunola, University of Jyväskylä	Non-presenting author
Isabelle Roskam, Université Catholique de Louvain	Non-presenting author

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