Experience in developing and evaluating psychometric indicators of a disciplinary practices scale on a sample of parents (mothers) of preschool-aged children

Parental disciplinary practices encompass the influences, techniques, and measures that parents use in raising children to facilitate the acquisition of behavioral norms consistent with social standards and parental expectations, or to address behavioral violations. Contemporary Russian literature lacks instruments developed to identify the specific of these practices. This study aims to address these limitations. The study involved 549 mothers of preschool children aged 24 to 55 years (M = 36.74, SD = 4.91). The children’s ages ranged from 4.75 to 6.83 years (M = 5.86, SD = 0.31), 51% male. The Parental Disciplinary Practices Scale was developed based on several foreign measures and includes 11 items that characterize various disciplinary practices: time-out, physical punishment, verbal aggression, deprivation of privileges, ignoring the child, ignoring the child’s incorrect behavior, verbal interaction, redirecting the child’s attention, monitoring, modeling the child’s behavior, and providing natural consequences for violating rules or discipline. To establish the scale’s validity, the brief version of the Item-reduced Comprehensive General Parenting Questionnaire and the Scale of Parental Practices of Cognitive Stimulation and Warmth were used. Factor analysis revealed a three-factor structure of the Parental Disciplinary Practices Scale. An acceptable level of scale reliability was identified. A relationship between the subscales and different parental practices, was found, indicating the validity of the developed instrument. It is concluded that the scale can be used for research purposes. The limitations of the results obtained and the perspective of further research on parental disciplinary practices are discussed.

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