Scientific background: Parental Stress

About this test

The Parental Stress Scale was developed in 1995 by Berry and Jones as a shorter alternative to the 101-item Parenting Stress Index. Its distinctive feature: it deliberately captures not just demanding aspects, but also positive, enriching aspects of parenting -- both contribute to the overall picture of parental stress. Higher scores are associated in studies with lower parental sensitivity, more child behavior problems, and lower quality of the parent-child relationship -- the scale is used, among other things, to track change from parenting programs or family support. The bands used here follow a population-based Norwegian sample of 1,096 parents of one-year-olds (Nærde & Hukkelberg, 2020, PLOS ONE), which reports a mean of 31.0 (SD=7.27) on the 18-90 raw score range: the "average" range corresponds to roughly one standard deviation around that mean.

Dimensions

Sources & license

• Berry, J. O., & Jones, W. H. (1995). The Parental Stress Scale: Initial psychometric evidence. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 12(3), 463–472.

  The Parental Stress Scale is public domain and may be used, including digitally, without permission; the authors ask to be consulted before altering the wording itself. Item wording and reverse-scored items were verified verbatim against the original publication and multiple reproductions in public health toolkits.

• Nærde, A., & Hukkelberg, S. S. (2020). An examination of validity and reliability of the Parental Stress Scale in a population based sample of Norwegian parents. PLOS ONE, 15(11), e0242735.

  This article is published under the CC BY 4.0 license. The descriptive statistics reported there (M=31.0, SD=7.27, N=1,096) were used to derive the scoring bands used here; these are not officially published clinical cutoffs.

  https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0242735