Parental self-efficacy for reducing the risk of adolescent depression and anxiety during a pandemic: Scale development and validation.

Background

The COVID-19 pandemic has negatively impacted adolescent mental health. Parents can play an important role in preventing adolescent mental health problems like depression and anxiety disorders. Pandemic situations present new challenges that are likely to impact parents’ confidence in their parenting. Given the possibility of future pandemics, parents need self-efficacy for taking action to protect the mental health of their adolescents. Improving parental self-efficacy requires suitable outcome measures. However, there is no validated measure to assess parental self-efficacy in relation to parenting behaviours implicated in the prevention of adolescent depression and anxiety disorders within a pandemic context.

Method

This study aimed to develop and validate the Parental Self-Efficacy Scale for Pandemic situations (PSES-Pandemic) using a sample of 587 Australian parents of adolescents aged 12 to 17 participating in a preventive parenting intervention trial.

Results

The PSES-Pandemic demonstrated good internal consistency and confirmatory factor analysis supported a single factor. Convergent validity was supported by moderate to large correlations with validated measures of both parental self-efficacy and parenting behaviours. Smaller, significant correlations with measures of parent distress and adolescent depressive and anxiety symptoms supported divergent validity.

Conclusions

These findings provide preliminary support for the reliability and validity of the PSES-Pandemic, which could help inform and facilitate the evaluation of preventive parenting interventions for adolescent mental health in a pandemic context, and could be adapted for future large-scale disasters (e.g., future pandemics, natural disasters).