Parenting Children and Adolescents (PARCA) scale English to Spanish translation: An investigation of measurement invariance.

ABSTRACT

Parenting is multidimensional and dynamic, involving a complex set of behaviors as well as thousands of decisions and interactions that affect the lives of children. Numerous parenting measures have been developed over the years, but very few have been shown to have strong psychometric properties. Further, of those with strong psychometric properties, only a handful have been translated into Spanish, and these have not been well tested. Given the importance that parenting plays in the development of children and the fact that Latinos are the fastest growing minority group in the United States, there is a need for studies of general parenting measures that compare the psychometric properties of their English and Spanish versions. The current study tests measurement invariance of the English and Spanish versions of the Parenting Children and Adolescents (PARCA) scale, a brief 19-item questionnaire designed to measure parenting practices in children between the ages of 6 and 18 years. Results indicate that the PARCA was largely invariant across language groups (i.e., configural and metric invariance were supported); though a few items demonstrated differential functioning in the intercepts, effect sizes for these group differences were generally modest to negligible. Thus, findings suggest that the PARCA can be used to measure parenting dimensions and examine associations among those dimensions in studies of English- compared with Spanish-speaking parents. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).