Short Self-Assessment Questionnaire for Parents with Young Children on Caregiver Strengths and Strains: Development...

To evaluate reliability and validity of the Balance Scale to measure the (im)balance between caregiver strengths and strains from parents' perspectives and identify parents who struggle with balancing the care and upbringing of their children.

Literature and focus groups with parents were used to develop a short questionnaire called the Balance Scale. The final Balance Scale was determined after testing through a think-aloud procedure. The internal consistency and criterion validity of the Balance Scale were evaluated using a cross-sectional design. The new Balance Scale and the validated Structured Problem Analyses Raising Kids (SPARK) were offered to parents of children at the age of 5 years during preventive youth health care visits.

Five themes-experience in parenting, support, relationship and agreement with partner, complicating family factors, and adaptability-and 8 questions were included in the Balance Scale, which took approximately 2 minutes to fill out and showed good internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha = 0.722). Both the Balance Scale and the SPARK were available from 1226 parents. The Balance Scale was negatively correlated with the SPARK assessments for parents' concerns (correlation coefficient = -0.28; P < .001) and their need for support (-0.22; P < .001). The relative risk of increased or high risk according to SPARK was 0.84 for each Balance Scale point increment.

The Balance Scale is a reliable, valid, and compact instrument, enabling parents and professionals to quickly gain insight into parents' perceived (im)balance between their caregiver strengths and strains.