"Convergent and discriminant validity of retrospective assessments of the quality of childhood parenting: Prospective evidence from infancy to age 26 years"

Chancellor’s Professor Emerita Deborah Lowe Vandell published an article with colleagues in Psychological Science assessing retrospective reports of childhood caregiving quality as a proxy for prospective data.
 
The title of the article is “Convergent and discriminant validity of retrospective assessments of the quality of childhood parenting: Prospective evidence from infancy to age 26 years.”
 
Co-authors are doctoral student Marissa D. Nivison, University of Minnesota (first author); Professor Cathryn Booth-LaForce, University of Washington; and Distinguished Professor Glenn I. Roisman, University of Minnesota.
 
Vandell served as the Founding Dean of UCI's School of Education and is one of the principal investigators of the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development. Her work is viewed by many social scientists as one of the most comprehensive studies of the short-term and long-term effects of early education programs, schooling, and the family on children’s development. She is the author of more than 150 articles and three books.

Deborah Lowe Vandell

Abstract

​​Retrospective self-report assessments of adults’ childhood experiences with their parents are widely employed in psychological science, but such assessments are rarely validated against actual parenting experiences measured during childhood. Here, we leveraged prospectively acquired data characterizing mother–child and father–child relationship quality using observations, parent reports, and child reports covering infancy through adolescence. At age 26 years, approximately 800 participants completed a retrospective measure of maternal and paternal emotional availability during childhood. Retrospective reports of childhood emotional availability demonstrated weak convergence with composites reflecting prospectively acquired observations (R2s = .01–.05) and parent reports (R2s = .02–.05) of parenting quality. Retrospective parental availability was more strongly associated with prospective assessments of child-reported parenting quality (R2s = .24–.25). However, potential sources of bias (i.e., depressive symptoms and family closeness and cohesiveness at age 26 years) accounted for more variance in retrospective reports (39%–40%) than did prospective measures (26%), suggesting caution when using retrospective reports of childhood caregiving quality as a proxy for prospective data.