Reliability of retrospective reports of perceived maternal acceptance-rejection in childhood

Research reported here addresses the issue of the reliability of retrospective reports of children's perceptions of maternal acceptance-rejection as measured by the Parental Acceptance-Rejection Questionnaire. A sample of 49 middle-class Caucasian 7- to 11-yr.-old children were asked to respond to the questionnaire reflecting on their mothers' current accepting-rejecting behaviors. Seven years later the same children--now adolescents--responded to the same questionnaire with the instruction to reflect back on their mothers' behavior when the youth were about 7 to 11 years of age. None of these youth recalled having been tested seven years earlier. A simple zero-order correlation between scores in childhood and adolescence was 62, indicating that adolescents' retrospective recollections were in moderate agreement with their reports during childhood. Thus, it seems clear that, at least with respect to perceptions of maternal acceptance-rejection as measured by the Parental Acceptance-Rejection Questionnaire, researchers can have reasonable confidence that adolescents' current recollections about their experiences of maternal acceptance-rejection are likely to be in moderate agreement with what they would have reported had they been tested during childhood.