The goal of this project is to develop sets of items measuring central aspects of the mother-child relationship appropriate for children aged 3- 11 that can feasibly be administered in the context of a large-scale household survey. Four scales will be constructed: l) Cognitive stimulation; 2) Warmth; 3) Discipline and punitiveness; and 4) Aggravation or enjoyment of parenting. Scales measuring these four construct domains included in the NLSY-CS (National Longitudinal Survey of Youth-Child Supplement) and the JOBS evaluation CFSS (Child and Family Sub-Group Study) will be developed. The reliability of these scales will be examined for varied segments of the population. Second, we will examine data from videotaped mother-child interactions from the JOBS observational study. Using the same four parenting constructs, we will assess the reliability for the observational items and compare them with comparable items from the surveys. Similarly, correlations with background items will be prepared for the observational items; these correlations will be contrasted with such correlations from survey data. Correlations between survey and observational data will be examined in detail, across all four constructs, as well as within constructs. Third, we will examine the relative strength of our measures of the mother-child relationship as predictors of child outcomes, using data from the JOBS evaluation and from the NLSY-CS. These data bases are complimentary in the data they provide. Thus, for example, the JOBS research provides observational as well as survey data, but the NLSY-CS will extend findings to older child ages and varying population subgroups. Fourth, we will conduct focus groups among European-American, African- American, and Hispanic-American mothers of varied socioeconomic backgrounds to contribute to our assessment of the validity of the scales. Fifth, we will evaluate the results of these activities by pre-testing a revised set of items on a sample of 300 mothers. On the basis of this pre- test, we will select an abbreviated set of scale items which can be disseminated for use in other studies of child outcome and parenting or large-scale survey studies.
