Validation of the adapted version of the parent perception inventory - PPI for brazilian children aged 7 to 12 years

Abstract

The theme of raising a child has received attention of many researchers and several papers have devoted particular attention to parental styles and practices. Since the 1930s, psychology researchers, and clinicians have been concerned with issues such as: What is the best way to educate children and what are the consequences that can be caused in their development when educated by different models of parents. Considering the relevance of the relationship between parents and children in the development process, this study aimed to validate, through the confirmatory factorial analysis, a version adapted of the Parent Perception Inventory PPI for Brazilian children to measure children's perceptions of parents’ behavior. The study included 600 children aged from 7 to 12 years, both boys and girls, from public and private schools in the city of Ribeirão Preto-SP, who answered two versions of the PPI, one for the father and one for the mother, each with 18 items which evaluate nine classes of positive behavior and nine classes of negative behavior. By means of the Maximum Likelihood method, the two-dimensional model, positive and negative, could beconfirmed, referring to the adopted practices, distributed respectively in the odd and even items of the scale for the two versions. These components presented Cronbach's alpha between 0.67 and 0.81 and correlated positively with the domains of the scale used to test the convergent validity. We conclude that the instrument is valid and can be used in studies to identify parental behavior from the child's point of view.