Graduate Program

School Psychology

Degree Name

Specialist in School Psychology

Semester of Degree Completion

1996

Thesis Director

Christine McCormick

Abstract

This study begins to develop a measure assessing parents' willingness to consider their preschool child's perspective, and the parents use of this information when considering appropriate disciplinary strategies. The literature on parenting includes this construct among the skills parents could use to increase the relationship and communication between themselves and their children; however, no research prior to this study shows empirical support for this construct. Thirty-two participants, all mothers of children between the ages to two and four, completed three measures: the Parent Behavior Checklist (PBC; Fox, 1994) and two measures developed for this study: vignettes (PCCV) and a direct measure (PDQ) assessing parent's willingness to consider his or her preschool child's perspective. It was hypothesized that higher scores on the measures of parental willingness to consider the preschool child's point of view would be associated with realistic developmental expectations, little corporal punishment, and a high level of nurturance on the PBC.

Results of this study indicated that the parents' scores on the three subscales of the PBC fell within a range considered to be average. A significant negative correlation was found between the vignette scores ( PCCV) and the Expectation sub scale of the PBC, suggesting that parents who were likely to consider their child's perspective were not likely to place extremely high developmental expectations on their children. Marginal relationships were found between a parent's willingness to consider the child's perspective and less tendency to use corporal punishment.

This study suggests that the vignettes of the PCCV may be a more promising measure than the direct questions on the PDQ at assessing parental considerations of the child's perspective. Results of this study suggest that the construct measured in this study does not appear to be the same as the behaviors measured on the PBC; however, it does appear to be related to these behaviors.

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