The development and validation of the questionnaire My Experience with ADHD Pharmacotherapy - Parent Report (ME...

Nonadherence to pharmacological treatment for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is common among children and adolescents. Despite well-documented clinical and contextual barriers, to the best of our knowledge no dedicated tool exists to quantify parental challenges in supporting adherence. This study aimed to develop and evaluate the My Experience with ADHD Pharmacotherapy - Parent Report (ME WAPH-P) questionnaire. The ME WAPH-P was developed based on existing instruments, clinical experience, expert input, and literature on nonadherence. The initial 30-item questionnaire assessed adherence-related challenges across six subscales. Parents of children aged 4-18 years who had received ADHD medication were recruited via social media and a commercial survey platform. The final sample included 351 parents. Psychometric evaluation included internal consistency, item discrimination, subscale intercorrelations, and exploratory factor analysis (oblique rotation). After removing one item, the 29-item scale demonstrated excellent internal consistency (Cronbach's α = 0.90). Subscale reliability demonstrated moderate-to-high intercorrelations. Parallel analysis supported a three-factor structure explaining 44.7% of variance, with moderately correlated factors and some cross-loadings. Parents' primary concerns focused on adverse effects, doubts about effectiveness and safety, summer treatment breaks, and child resistance. Parents of children treated for less than one year reported significantly higher challenge scores, supporting criterion validity. The current preliminary study supports the potential of the ME WAPH-P in capturing a broad, multidimensional construct of parental challenges in ADHD medication adherence. Findings highlighted child resistance as an underexplored barrier. The dimensionality of the questionnaire construct suggests a cumulative "adherence burden". This novel tool may support clinical identification and monitoring of adherence challenges with implications for targeted clinical intervention.