Overview
Designed to evaluate the magnitude of stress in the parent-child system, the fourth edition of the popular PSI is a 120-item inventory that focuses on three major domains of stressor source: child characteristics, parent characteristics, and situational/demographic life stress.
Suitable for
Parents of children from birth to 12 years.
Language Versions
English
Product Description
The PSI-4 is commonly used as a screening and triage measure for evaluating the parenting system and identifying issues that may lead to problems in the child's or parent's behaviour. This information may be used for designing a treatment plan, for setting priorities for intervention, and/or for follow-up evaluation. Other common settings for administration of the PSI-4 include medical centres where children are receiving medical care, outpatient therapy settings, paediatric practices, and treatment outcome monitoring.
Features and benefits
- Revised to improve the psychometric limitations of individual items and to update item wording to more clearly tap into the target construct or behavioral pattern. The original structure has been retained.
- Validation studies conducted within a variety of foreign populations, including Chinese, Portuguese, French Canadian, Finnish and Dutch, suggest that the PSI is a robust measure that maintains its validity with diverse non-English speaking cultures.
- Expanded norms are organised by each year of child age. Percentiles— the primary interpretive framework for the PSI-4 — and T scores are provided.
- One validity scale—Defensive Responding—indicates whether the parent is responding in a defensive manner.
Test structure
Two domains, the Child Domain and Parent Domain, combine to form the Total Stress scale. The Life Stress scale provides information about the amount of parent stress caused by factors outside the parent-child relationship.
- Within the Child Domain, six sub-scales (Distractibility/Hyperactivity, Adaptability, Reinforces Parent, Demandingness, Mood, and Acceptability) evaluate sources of stress as gathered from the parent's report of child characteristics.
- Within the Parent Domain, seven sub-scales (Competence, Isolation, Attachment, Health, Role Restriction, Depression, and Spouse/Parenting Partner Relationship) measure sources of stress related to parent characteristics.
PSI-4 Short Form
The PSI-4 SF is an abbreviated version of the full-length PSI-4.
- Thirty-six items are broken down into three domains: Parental Distress (PD), Parent-Child Dysfunctional Interaction (P-CDI) and Difficult Child (DC), which combine to form a Total Stress scale.
- One simple form contains all the user needs for administering the measure and for scoring and profiling results.
- The PSI-4 SF's brevity allows primary health care providers to identify and target those families most in need of follow-up services. It is also ideal for use in schools, mental health clinics and research.
- Empirical validity has been shown to exist in studies that focused on parenting for Head Start children, medication adherencre and cognitive development of infants.
Qualification level required:
Level 2. Please see our Test User Qualifications page for guidance
Norms
New normative data were collected from a sample of 534 mothers and 522 fathers stratified to match the demographic composition of the 2007 U.S. Census.
Duration
PSI 4: Admin time 20 minutes, Scoring time 5 minutes. PSI 4 SF: Admin time 10 minutes, Scoring time 2 minutes.
Release Note
2012
