[Parenthood and parenting stress: psychometric testing of the Parenting Stress Index (PSI) in a German sample]

The Parenting Stress Index (PSI) consists of 120 items measuring the subjective burden--labelled as parenting stress--of adults in parenting children from the age of newborns up to 12 years. The PSI is a self report scale which was developed in the US in 1976. Since then the PSI has been widely used in family and parenting research and was validated in many different languages but not yet in German. Therefore we administered the PSI to a sample of 372 German speaking parents with children from newborns up to 12 years of age in Basel, Switzerland. The questionnaire was handed out to parents in schools, kindergartens and day care centers along with one other complementary questionnaire such as the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) or the Dyadic Adjustment Scale (DAS) measuring similar or divergent constructs. Internal consistency was high with a Cronbach's alpha Coefficient of 0.95 for total stress and 0.91 and 0.92 for the subscores of the child domain and parent domain respectively. The selectivity of most items ranged from sufficient to good. In order to assess the structure of the PSI factor analysis was performed. The principle component analysis revealed a two-factor solution accounting for 58 % of variance. The factorial structure of the original scale was therefore replicated. However, a three-factor solution seemed to describe data better. Correlations with other self report scales resulted as predicted. In summary the German translation of the PSI proved to assess reliably the construct of parenting stress. This instrument will serve family researchers and clinicians in German speaking countries to detect families at risk.