Psychometric properties of a behavioral scale for parents with young children.

The main purpose of this work was to analyze the psychometric properties of a parenting behavior scale (ECMP, in Spanish). The ECMP is a tool that measures three aspects of parenting young children, namely, expectations, discipline, and nurturing. Due to the recent development of this tool several psychometric properties of it have not been assessed. Therefore, we designed four studies to establish repeated measures reliability, convergent validity, and the possible influence of social desirability response set on the ECMP, we also compared two versions of the ECMP. Subjects for each study were parents with one child between 1 year and 5 years, 11 months of age. We administered a demographic questionnaire and the ECMP in every study. Convergent validity of the ECMP was assessed by comparing it with the Adult-Adolescent Parenting Inventory-Spanish. To assess social desirability, we administered a brief version of a scale of social desirability. The ECMP was also compared with a 32-item version of it. Results indicate that the ECMP shows adequate psychometric properties and the discussion focuses on the possible applications for this scale.