Development and validation of a parental competence questionnaire in the paediatric hospital emergency setting...

To develop and validate a parental competence questionnaire for parents of children seeking care in hospital emergency departments.

An instrumental study of the development of an assessment questionnaire was carried out in three phases: 1) review of relevant measures and item generation, 2) content validity evaluation, 3) psychometric evaluation. Exploratory factor analysis was performed to examine the factorial structure. Internal consistency was evaluated using ordinal alpha. Hypothesis testing was determined between the resulting factors, the Parental Stress Scale and the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory.

The participants were 270 parents of children aged 0-14 years old from a referral hospital in Valencia (Spain). An 18-item questionnaire was developed, comprising five factors that explain 53.0% of the variance: 1) "emotional management and expression", 2) "passive social support", 3) "parental agency", 4) "basic needs and care" and 5) "active social support". The internal consistency for the different factors was modest (>0.70). A negative correlation between the Parental Stress Scale and the parental competence questionnaire was found for most of the factors.

This questionnaire on parental competence in the hospital emergency department (ECP-U) is a useful and simple self-report instrument for assessing the parental competence of parents with children in the emergency department.

The resulting questionnaire is of practical value to both healthcare professionals and researchers in this field. It can be administered quickly in clinical practice and used to identify parents' levels of parental competence and refer those with difficulties to appropriate support services.