Validation of the Parental Feelings Inventory with Parents of Adolescent Clinical Sample

The study extends the examination of the structure and validity of the Parental Feelings Inventory to parents of adolescents with externalizing and internalizing behavior problems by employing exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses and by testing its scales’ validity against related external variables. Its goal is to verify the instrument’s validity in wider parental populations than those for which it was originally validated (that is, parents of pre-school children). The sample included 519 parents (321 mothers and 198 fathers) of adolescents attending the child and adolescent psychiatric center of a public hospital that serves a multi-ethnic population in its region. The findings derived from the factorial analyses yielded a five-factor structure for the PFI (i.e., anxious, angry, satisfied, happy, and sad), with the factors correspondingly correlating with the parents’ concurrent reports of well-being and difficulties in emotional regulation. Subject to the study’s limitations, its findings suggest that the PFI can be used to assess parental feelings with parents of adolescents, which may advance the instrument’s usage by researchers and clinicians with a larger age range.