Poster #76 - Creation of a Short-Form and Brief Short-Form Version of The Coping with Children’s Negative Emotions Scale

• In Event: Poster Session 09

Abstract

Background: The Coping with Children’s Negative Emotions Scale (CCNES) is a widely used measure of parent emotion socialization; however, it is a lengthy measure and it is unclear whether all items are appropriately aligned with, and fully capture, the underlying constructs. We aimed to examine content validity of the CCNES, evaluating theoretical alignment between the CCNES and Gottman et al.’s (1996) meta-emotion theory, and develop two short-forms.

Method: Data were collected from an age-stratified longitudinal cohort study, name of study retracted (weblink retracted). Participants were parents of children aged 4-10 years (N = 937), residing in Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Ireland, the United States, and Canada. Five content experts within the field of emotion socialization first qualitatively evaluated parent-report items of the CCNES and additional items that measured empathy. The expert raters were required to read each CCNES item (including the vignette it originated from) and then provide a score reflecting how relevant 10 socialization behaviors were to each item. We then derived an item-level content validity index for all of the emotion socialization behaviors, for each item (i.e., 10 I-CVIs were derived for each item). We also calculated the mean of all I-CVIs for each behavior within a subscale, referred to as a scale-level content validity index, to provide an overview of which emotion socialization behaviors were assessed by each subscale.



The CCNES and empathy subscales were then quantitatively evaluated via confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) separately in one-factor models via Mplus, using a calibration sample (n = 468, i.e., 50% of N = 937). To examine psychometric properties of the short-forms, we conducted the following tests: 1) cross-validation with a different sample of parents (N = 469; 2) internal consistency; 3) test-retest reliability; 4) criterion validity; 4) measurement invariance testing of the short-forms for mothers versus fathers, and parents of children in early childhood (i.e., aged 4-6 years) versus mid-childhood (i.e., aged 7-10 years).   



Results: Twenty of the 84 items were found to not align with meta-emotion theory. We reduced each subscale to a set of three robust, parsimonious indicators, via CFA. Items with poor psychometric properties were preferentially removed. The final subscales were then included in one model. After the iterative process of item reduction, a six-factor model with three items per factor (18 items in total, using six vignettes) was identified as the best-fitting model. After selecting items from the short-form, we found that a two-factor model with three items per factor was identified as the best-fitting model (6 items in total, using four vignettes).



Conclusion: The short-form CCNES measures provide viable, theoretically-consistent alternatives to the original CCNES measure, that are aligned with Gottman et al.’s (1996) meta-emotion theory as well as emotion socialization theory more broadly. Improving the alignment between emotion socialization theory and measurement advances research with children and families by increasing the reliability with which this construct can be measured when exploring these aspects of parenting and when evaluating interventions of parents’ emotion socialization.

Authors

• Gabriella King, Deakin University
  Presenting Author

• Christiane Evelyne Kehoe, University of Melbourne

• Sophie Seychelle Havighurst, University of Melbourne

• George Youssef, Deakin University

• Jacqui Macdonald, School of Psychology, Deakin University

• Julie C Dunsmore, University of Houston

• Tomer Berkowitz, Deakin University

• Elizabeth Mary Westrupp, Deakin University