Escala de expectativas parentales acerca de la prosocialidad de los hijos: construcción y análisis psicométricos preliminares

Introduction: Parental expectations refer to those beliefs parents have regarding their children's performance in a specific area. In particular, the present study examines parents' expectations about their children's prosocial behavior. Prosocial behavior is defined as voluntary performance carried out so as to benefit others. Objective: Developing an instrument in order to evaluate parental expectations about their children's prosocial behavior and conducting a preliminary assessment of its psychometric properties. Method: Initially, a pool of 50 items submitted to the assessment of five expert judges was drafted. The adjusted version was administered to a pilot sample of 20 parents who evaluated the understanding and clarity of the reactives used. Subsequently, the revised scale was administered to 486 parents of both sexes (M = 39.4; SD = 5.85) from the provinces of Cordoba and Entre Rios (Argentina). Descriptive statistics for each item, their discriminative power and the homogeneity index corrected by item was evaluated. Results: All items were discriminative (p <.001). From a sub-sample of 267 cases, EFA was conducted in order to obtain an initial item refinement. The one-dimensional structure of the instrument was corroborated by CFA using a sub-sample of 219 cases. The final scale was composed of 28 items, operationalized through a single factor which explained 61% of the total variance. The internal consistency of the scale was satisfactory (⍵ = .97). Conclusion: The analysis carried out so far show adequate psychometric properties, which suggests that the scale will successfully enable to assess parental expectations about prosocial behavior within the context of study.