Background: Parental responsiveness is a parent's predisposition to react to their child's verbal and non-verbal cues promptly and adequately. There is no self-report scale that measures this type of behavior. The aim of this study was to construct a valid and useful scale to measure this construct as subjectively reported by parents of young children.
Participants and procedure: Two hundred and fifty parents (including 186 mothers) of young children aged from 1 to 18 months (Mage = 8.60, SDage = 4.06) took part in the study. To confirm the external validity of the tool, participants filled in the following questionnaires: the Parental Responsiveness Scale, the Empathic Sensitivity Scale, and the Experience in Close Relationships-Revised Scale - short version.
Results: The confirmatory analysis verified the one-dimensional structure and that the model has a good fit. Moreover, the results of external validation indicated satisfactory correlations between parental responsiveness and empathic concern (r = .30, p < .01), perspective-taking (r = .31, p < .01), and avoidance (r = .23, p < .01) in relationships.
Conclusions: The Parental Responsiveness Scale is valid and reliable. This scale could be useful in research on family and child development, and on individual differences between parents, but can also be of use in practice.
Keywords: empathy; infants; parental responsiveness; parenting; psychometrics.
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