Relationship Of Parental Self-efficacy And School-aged Children’s Problem Behavior:the Mediate Role Of Parenting Behavior

Objective:To develop a native measurement of school-aged parental self-efficacy scale and the related cognitive structure subscale and explore the construction of parental self-efficacy. Then, explore the meditate effect of parenting style between parental self-efficacy and children problem behavior.Methods:Establishing the construct of school-aged parental self-efficacy and gather its item via reviewing the papers and open-end interview, after the initial measurement, the statistical analysis and discussion with experts, we established the formal measurement of parental self-efficacy scale and the related cognitive subscale and the other relative measurement.648parents (399fathers and249mothers) and347children (156boys and160girls) were randomly sampled from two Primary schools of Changsha city, Hunan province. Cronbach’s α reliability coefficient, split-related coefficient and the retest coefficient were used to analyse the reliability. The validity included construct validity and criterion validity. The structural equation model was used to verify the mediating role of parenting style between parental self-efficacy and children problem behaviors.Results:Exploratory factor analysis showed that:the parental self-efficacy scale extracted six factors eigenvalue greater than1, were named as the study instruction self-efficacy, emotional care self-efficacy, behavior guidance and discipline self-efficacy, social activities guidance self-efficacy, health and secure promoting self-efficacy and mood management self-efficacy. The six factors explained the total rate——59.18%(father) and60.36%(mother). The cognitive structure subscales includes three dimensions which are sense of responsibility, mastery motivation and control of outcome beliefs, the three factors totally explained the rate of49.56%. The reliability analysis showed that the internal consistency reliability of each dimension of the parental self-efficacy is in the0.743-0.945, the split-half reliability is in the0.660-0.890, the internal consistency reliability of the related cognitive structure subscale is in the0.684-0.781. The test-retest reliability of parental self-efficacy is in the0.757-0.857and the cognitive structure subscale test-retest reliability is in the0.741-0.823. The internal relation analysis results show that the coefficients between the various dimensions of parental self-efficacy are moderate, the correlations with the total score are high, correlation with the three cognitive structures are low to moderate. The validity analysis showed that parental self-efficacy scale has good convergent validity and criterion validity, most correlations between parental self-efficacy dimensions and parenting sense of competence scale are moderate, between parental self-efficacy and parenting style are low to medium. Structural Equation Modeling showed that the parental self-efficacy positively predicted children’s problem behavior, both positive parenting and negative parenting plays an intermediary role between parental self-efficacy and children’s problem behavior.Conclusion:(1) parental self-efficacy scale and related cognitive structure subscale structure are good, their reliability and validity reach the standard of psychometric.(2) parentsal self-efficacy is the motivation mechanism of parenting behavior, which can not only indirectly affect children’s problem behavior through parenting behavior but also directly affect the children’s problem behavior.