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Child Ability and Parental Attributions: Development and Validation of the Reasons for Children’s Behavior Scale

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Abstract

Parent attributions for children’s behavior affect parenting practices and emotional reactions. The current study aimed to create a new measure of parental attributions, called the Reasons for Children’s Behavior (RCB), to capture how parents take developmental ability into account when making attributions for specific behaviors. A 224-item survey was completed by 836 participants, including original items and established parent attribution and parenting construct scales. Exploratory factor analyses and item-response theory analyses were utilized to develop the RCB, which includes 30 items comprising seven subscales. The RCB demonstrated an extremely stable factor structure, high levels of internal consistency across 25 demographic groups, reasonable test-retest correlations across 2 weeks, appropriate convergent and discriminant validity, and unique predictive validity (i.e., incremental validity). The RCB offers researchers and clinicians a novel tool to better understand how parent attributions for child behavior impact parenting and larger family dynamics.

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Data Availability

This study was not preregistered. Data presented have not appeared in previous publications. All study IRB materials and the syntax used for the analyses are available at https://osf.io/mcy84/. The data is also available at that location upon reasonable request.

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Funding

This work was conducted in conjunction with the Collaborative Initiative on Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders, which is funded by grants from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Additional information about Collaborative Initiative on Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders can be found on the website www.cifasd.org. This research was supported by the National Institute of Health under Award #U01AA026104. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Rochester, 187 Edinburgh St, Rochester, NY, 14608, USA

    Carson Kautz-Turnbull, Ronald D. Rogge & Christie L.M. Petrenko

  2. Mount Hope Family Center, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, USA

    Carson Kautz-Turnbull & Christie L.M. Petrenko

Authors
  1. Carson Kautz-Turnbull
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  2. Ronald D. Rogge
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  3. Christie L.M. Petrenko
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Carson Kautz-Turnbull, Ronald Rogge, and Christie Petrenko. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Carson Kautz-Turnbull and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Carson Kautz-Turnbull.

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Ethical Approval

All study procedures and materials were approved by the university institutional review board and performed in accordance with the ethical standards as laid down in the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Kautz-Turnbull, C., Rogge, R.D. & Petrenko, C.L. Child Ability and Parental Attributions: Development and Validation of the Reasons for Children’s Behavior Scale. Child Psychiatry Hum Dev (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10578-024-01713-2

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