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Validation of the Perceived Chinese Overparenting Scale in Emerging Adults in Hong Kong

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Abstract

Overparenting is an emergent parenting style where parents are highly involved in their children’s routines and they remove the perceived obstacles that may happen in their children’s lives. However, validated measures that objectively assess overparenting are severely lacking in the Chinese communities. Based on a sample of 642 undergraduate students from Hong Kong, psychometric properties of the perceived Chinese Paternal Overparenting Scale (CPOS) and Chinese Maternal Overparenting Scale (CMOS) were examined in terms of internal consistency, test-retest reliability, convergent validity and factorial validity. Results indicated that both CPOS and CMOS showed good internal consistency and test–retest reliability. As predicted, the findings gave support for the convergent validity of the scales: CPOS and CMOS were significantly related to measures of paternal and maternal behavioral control, psychological control, and support; they were also negatively associated with self-efficacy but positively related to narcissistic behavior of emerging adults. Moreover, factor analyses showed that eight factors corresponding to the proposed conceptual model were abstracted from the CPOS and CMOS, respectively. The present study suggests that both CPOS and CMOS are reliable and valid assessment tools that can be used to measure parental overparenting in the Chinese context.

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Acknowledgements

This research was financially supported by the Departmental General Research Fund of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (Project Code: G-UA9S).

Author Contributions

J.L.: conceived of the study, designed and executed the study, performed the data analyses, and wrote the paper. D.S.: collaborated with the data collection and interpretation, and editing of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Applied Social Sciences, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Hong Kong

    Janet T. Y. Leung & Daniel T. L. Shek

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  1. Janet T. Y. Leung
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Correspondence to Janet T. Y. Leung.

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The authors declare that all procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the Human Subjects Ethics Sub-committee of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Leung, J.T.Y., Shek, D.T.L. Validation of the Perceived Chinese Overparenting Scale in Emerging Adults in Hong Kong. J Child Fam Stud 27, 103–117 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-017-0880-8

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