J Affect Disord. 2025 Aug 21:120086. doi: 10.1016/j.jad.2025.120086. Online ahead of print.
ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: Parents can play an important role in the prevention and treatment of school refusal, with several expert-consensus-based strategies that parents can use to respond to their adolescent’s school refusal. Parental self-efficacy (PSE) is necessary for parents to effectively implement these parenting behaviours. To date, there is no validated measure to assess PSE to respond to school refusal. Consequently, we developed the Parental Self-Efficacy to Respond to School Refusal Scale (PSES-SR) and aimed to validate this measure.
METHODS: Scale items were developed to assess PSE in relation to parenting behaviours from expert-consensus-based parenting guidelines. Help-seeking (N = 293) and community (N = 222) samples of parents of adolescents (11-18 years), residing in Australia, completed the PSES-SR and a battery of additional self-report questionnaires.
RESULTS: The 15-item PSES-SR demonstrated strong psychometric properties including high internal consistency reliability and good model fit through a single-factor structure in both samples. The PSES-SR was correlated with scales measuring PSE, preventive parenting, parent-reported adolescent anxiety and depression symptoms, child anxiety-related life interference, parent psychological distress, and number of school days refused.
LIMITATIONS: The sample primarily consisted of highly educated, English-speaking mothers, which reduces the generalisability of findings to fathers, parents with lower education levels, and those from diverse backgrounds.
CONCLUSIONS: The PSES-SR can be used clinically to help identify parents’ areas of confidence as well as potential targets for intervention, and serve as a screening or outcome measure to evaluate parenting interventions for the prevention and treatment of school refusal.
PMID:40848776 | DOI:10.1016/j.jad.2025.120086
