| Abstract: | The aim of the present study was to further validate the Parental Stress Index (PSI; Abidin, 1990) which claims to measure distinct sources of stress related to the parent and the child. Two hundred and forty five mothers completed the French version of the PSI and other questionnaires including the DAS (Spanier, 1976), the CBCL (Achenbach & Edelbrock, 1981) and the BDI (Beck, et al., 1961). A subsample of 218 mothers and their preschoolers were also directly observed during a problem solving task in the laboratory. In general, regression analyses indicated that both parent and child scales contributed significantly and independently to the prediction of marital adjustment, depression, the child's problems as reported by the mother and behaviors observed in the laboratory. As expected, the parent's scale when entered first explained most of the variance for factors related to the mother, such as marital adjustment (29%) and depression (45%), and the child's scale obtained no significant results when entered last. Moreover, the child's scale contributed over and above the parent's scale in predicting the child's difficulties (12%) as reported by the mother, and accounted for all the variance when entered first (31%). Intriguingly, results showed that the child scale significantly predicted mother and child behavior in the laboratory situation, but the parent scale contributed to the explained variance only when entered first. In general, these results suggest that the two main factors of the PSI represent valid and relatively independent sources of information. Considering clinical and research applications, the PSI may be particularly useful in assessing combinations of stressors, which appear to be specifically harmful for the parent-child relationship. |
