Center for Research in Neuropsychology and Cognitive Behavioral Intervention

General description, including constructs and dimensions being assessed, targeted population, number of items, factor structure and scoring [e.g., which items should be reversed, which items belong to each subscale, etc.]: Introduction: The Parenting Scale Self-Test (Gottman & Declaire, 1997) evaluates what parents think about emotions and the way they react to them. It also tries to determine the ways by which the parents teach their children to recognize, express and deal with emotions. Objective: The aim of this study is to evaluate the psychometric properties of PSST, namely its factorial structure and internal consistency. Methods: The sample consisted of 335 parents (65.07% female and 34.93% male) whose children are between 14 and 20 years of age. The nature of the present study is quantitative, analytical and cross-sectional. An exploratory factorial analysis was conducted using the principal components method with direct oblimin rotation. Results: The structure of the scale changed from the original, presenting in the Portuguese sample three parenting styles towards emotions: 1st factor – disapproving style (explaining 13.75% of total variance); 2nd factor – explorer style (explaining 11.41% of total variance) and 3rd factor – accepting style (explaining 6.72% of total variance). The internal consistency of the scale showed alpha values of .87, .85 and .70, respectively. Conclusions: This research constitutes an initial step in the study of the psychometric properties of the PSST in a sample of the Portuguese population, and it can be an important contribution for future research and clinical practice.