title: Evidence of Factorial Validity of Parental Knowledge, Control and Solicitation, and Adolescent Disclosure Scales: When the Ordered Nature of Likert Scales Matters.
abstract: For evaluating monitoring and parent-adolescent communication, a set of scales addressing parental knowledge, control and solicitation, and adolescent disclosure was proposed by Kerr and Stattin (2000). Although these scales have been widely disseminated, their psychometric proprieties have often been found to be unsatisfactory, raising questions about their validity. The current study examines whether their poor psychometric properties, which are mainly attributed to the relatively poor conceptual quality of the items, could have been caused by the use of less-than-optimal analytical estimation methods. A cross-validation approach is used on a sample of 1071 adolescents. Maximum likelihood (ML) is compared with the diagonal weighted least squares (DWLS) method, which is suitable for Likert scales. The results of the DWLS approach lead to a more optimal fit than that obtained using ML estimation. The DWLS methodology may represent a useful option for researchers using these scales because it corrects for their unreliability.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biological and Experimental Psychology, Queen Mary University of London London, UK.
authors.forename: Francesca
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Lionetti
authors.affiliation: Department of Developmental Psychology, Tilburg University Tilburg, Netherlands.
authors.forename: Loes
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Keijsers
authors.affiliation: Department of Brain and Behavioural Sciences, University of PaviaPavia, Italy; Department of Psychology, Salesian UniversityRome, Italy.
authors.forename: Antonio
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Dellagiulia
authors.affiliation: Department of Developmental and Social Psychology, University of Padova Padova, Italy.
authors.forename: Massimiliano
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Pastore
keywords: Likert scales; adolescent disclosure; confirmatory factor analysis; diagonal weighted least squares; parental monitoring