Development and early testing of the Role Enactment Questionnaire

The Role Enactment Questionnaire was developed to measure role intensity and role disparity experienced by the parents of young children. These two factors have been described as antecedents to role strain. The instrument subsumes three 5-point Likert scales that represent two dimensions and four roles. Scale development included: content validation and initial psychometric testing with 92 parents to conduct a reliability analysis. The final version of the Role Enactment Questionnaire consisted of 126 items. Cronbach's alphas were 0.90 for the disparity dimension and 0.89 for the intensity dimension. Test-retest reliabilities (r) based on the responses obtained from 78 of the parents were 0.73 and 0.80 for role disparity and role intensity, respectively.