Development and Initial Testing of the Parent Beliefs about Early Childhood Social–Emotional Development Instrument

BackgroundNo instrument exists to measure parent beliefs about early social–emotional development, which is foundational for child outcomes. We developed and tested an instrument to measure parent beliefs.MethodsPositive parenting was defined from the literature and 84 items were developed based on the theory of planned behavior (TPB). The instrument was tested with mothers (N = 200) from the United States.ResultsData support our initial supposition of five factors based upon the TPB, which accounted for 65.5% of the total variance.ConclusionThe instrument demonstrates strong initial psychometric properties and is ready for further testing.