This project's goals are to develop a sound measure of parental self-perceptions and to investigate influences upon these maternal feelings of satisfaction, competence, and investment surrounding the parental role. Research on the transition to parenthood and with parents of difficult or deviant children places great emphasis upon parental adjustment as a mediating variable. Such adjustment, however, usually is measured elliptically or with questionnaires of unknown or poor psychometric quality. Even some previous research suggests that parental self-perceptions should be related to (a) children's ages or problematic behaviors; (b) mothers' coping skills, defined as the amount of experience with infants; and (c) stresses upon and supports for the family. Using a cross-sectional design, a variety of questionnaires will be administered to a representative sample of 384 mothers in this mail-out/mail-back study. The first phase of the project will be devoted to refining the measures of parental self-perceptions and problematic child behavior. Once the scales are in final form, group differences (i.e., child age, maternal education, and parity) in self-perceptions will be examined, and analyses of the correlates of such self-perceptions--experiences with infants, problematic child behaviors, stresses, and supports--will be conducted. The group and correlational analyses will provide converging evidence for influences on maternal self-perceptions. In the second phase, data on retest reliability will be collected. These data also will verify the means, SDs, and alpha reliabilities of the revised scales. In sum, this project will (a) develop a psychometrically sound, well standardized measure of parental self-perceptions; (b) describe influences on such self-perceptions in a way that bears on theories of self-esteem, coercive family interactions, and the ecology of human development; and (c) provide data on the phenomenology of parenthood. This latter contribution is particularly relevant to adult mental health in that a normative picture will emerge of parents' adaptation to a major adult role, and how that adaptation may be hindered or facilitated. This study also lays the foundation for future studies on the parent-child social system: its operating characteristics, and how its reflective (e.g., self-perceptions) and interactive components are related.
