The Emotional Climate for Children as Inferred From Parental Attitudes: a Preliminary Validation of Three Scales

Abstract

The present paper sets forth a theoretical rationale for the mea surement of parental child-rearing attitudes when these attitudes are viewed as creating an emotional climate for children. Studies of emotional states have shown that the three orthogonal dimensions of pleasure, arousal, and dominance are both necessary and suf ficient to describe any emotional state. Drawing upon this frame work, a succinct description of parental attitudes can be devised with reference to their hypothesized emotional impact upon chil dren. Three questionnaire studies were done with mothers of chil dren three months to eight years of age. Progressive development of the measures of pleasure-, arousal-, and dominance-inducing quali ties of parental attitudes yielded an 18-item pleasure scale, a 12-item arousal scale, and a 16-item dominance scale. These scales exhibited satisfactory internal consistency reliabilities and, as expected, yielded small (in two instances, nonsignificant) intercorrelations. Only preliminary validational data were obtained. When further validated, the three scales should provide a parsimonious descriptive base for parental attitudes and for the investigation of currently available attitudinal measures.

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