Development and preliminary validation of a questionnaire to measure parental support for drawing

Drawing is first learned and practised in the home environment, and therefore parental influence should play a significant role in the development of drawing skill. However, both the content and extent of parental support for drawing have been understudied. Since drawing promotes chil-dren's cognitive, creative, and academic development, it seems valuable to have a tool to properly measure the impact of parental engagement with the child's drawing behavior. Here, we describe the process of the construction and preliminary validation of the Parental Support for Drawing Questionnaire (PSDQ), which comprised four phases: (1) item generation through a literature review, (2) establishing face validity and content validity using expert panels, (3) pre-testing in a pilot study, and (4) assessing the underlying factor construct, preliminary construct validity and internal consistency. Phase 4 was achieved through exploratory factor analysis using 203 par-ticipants. The questionnaire's final version includes four scales defined as Resource support, Joint drawing, Scaffolding, and Praise, and consists of 14 items. The psychometric properties are satisfactory, including factor loadings above 0.5, a Cronbach's Alpha value of alpha = 0.77, and explaining 63.95% of total variance. This study revealed the multidimensional nature of parental support for drawing, and generated the first tool to measure parental support in a drawing context. The PSDQ allows researchers and education professionals to investigate the influence of parental support for drawing (both type and extent) on children's drawing skill, creativity, cognitive development, and academic success. Further research should establish the question-naire's construct validity and cross-cultural applicability.