Measuring Parental Support: The Interrelationship of Three Measures

While a variety of scales and instruments to measure parental support sexist, most of these have not received adequate analysis. Utilizing tow bodies of data, the widely used Heilbrun, Cornell, and Schaefer measures of parental support were examined in an attempt to answer three guiding questions: (1) do the three measures interrelate in meaningful ways? (2) is support a unidimensional construct? (3) assuming multidimensionality, can subscales with adequate reliability and validity be created? The factor analytic results extracted multiple dimensions of parental support, thus supporting the assumption of conceptual differentiation within the central construct. They further indicate similarity between the Heilbrun and Cornell scales with less similarity between the Heilbrun and Schaefer scales. The various subscales of parental support were shown to have adequate alpha coefficients of internal-consistency reliability and fair discriminate and construct validity correlations.