Jeong Joshua, Mapendo Frank, Hentschel Elizabeth, McCann Juliet K, Yousafzai Aisha K
Hubert Department of Global Health, Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University.
Africa Academy for Public Health.
Dev Psychol. 2025 Jan 9. doi: 10.1037/dev0001909.
A strong body of evidence has underscored the cross-cultural importance of nurturing parent-child relationships for promoting early child development outcomes. However, most research on parenting has predominantly relied on self-reported measures collected from mothers. Observational tools for assessing parent-child interactions from not only mothers but also fathers remains limited, especially in Majority World contexts. This study aimed to evaluate the psychometric properties of an observational tool for assessing mother-child and father-child dyadic interactions in rural Mara, Tanzania. Specifically, we conducted exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses to determine the dimensionality of the measure, tested measurement invariance by parental gender, and assessed its predictive validity with early child development outcomes. We analyzed data from 1,690 parent-child dyads (927 mother-child dyads and 763 father-child dyads) with children under 2 years of age. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses revealed a two-factor model with good model fit and acceptable internal consistency and interrater reliability between trained coders. While the measure demonstrated configural invariance by parental gender, it did not meet the criteria for metric or scalar invariance, indicating that maternal and paternal scores cannot be directly compared. Nonetheless, regression analyses showed positive associations between mother-child and father-child interaction scores and children's later development. Our findings establish the reliability and predictive validity of this observational tool for assessing early parent-child interactions in rural Tanzania. Future research directions and methodological considerations for using this observational tool with both mothers and fathers in Majority World countries are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).
大量证据强调了培养亲子关系对促进儿童早期发展成果的跨文化重要性。然而，大多数关于育儿的研究主要依赖于从母亲那里收集的自我报告测量方法。用于评估不仅来自母亲而且来自父亲的亲子互动的观察工具仍然有限，特别是在世界大多数地区的背景下。本研究旨在评估一种用于评估坦桑尼亚马拉农村地区母婴和父子二元互动的观察工具的心理测量特性。具体而言，我们进行了探索性和验证性因素分析以确定该测量的维度，按父母性别测试测量不变性，并评估其与儿童早期发展成果的预测效度。我们分析了来自1690对亲子二元组（927对母婴二元组和763对父子二元组）中2岁以下儿童的数据。探索性和验证性因素分析揭示了一个双因素模型，该模型具有良好的模型拟合度、可接受的内部一致性以及训练有素的编码员之间的评分者间信度。虽然该测量方法按父母性别显示出构型不变性，但它未达到度量或标量不变性的标准，这表明母亲和父亲的得分不能直接比较。尽管如此，回归分析表明母婴和父子互动得分与儿童后期发展之间存在正相关。我们的研究结果确立了这种观察工具在评估坦桑尼亚农村地区早期亲子互动方面的可靠性和预测效度。讨论了在世界大多数国家将这种观察工具同时用于母亲和父亲的未来研究方向和方法学考虑因素。（PsycInfo数据库记录（c）2025美国心理学会，保留所有权利）
