Construction and Validation of a Parent-Adolescent Conflict Questionnaire (Adolescent's Form)

The purpose of the present study was to determine the sources and issues of parent-adolescent conflict from the perspective of adolescents and to construct, validate, and identify the factorial structure of a scale for assessing parentadolescent conflict from adolescents’ point of view. This research was undertaken in four phases and a different sample was utilized in each phase. In the first stage, which was conducted to determine the sources or issues of conflict, the sample comprised 650 adolescents; in the second phase, i.e., the pilot study, the sample consisted of 90 individuals; in the third stage, which was carried out in order to identify and select appropriate items, the psychometric characteristics of the items and scales were investigated and a factor analysis of the questionnaire was performed; in this phase the sample was comprised of 1308 adolescents. And finally 605 participants took part in the fourth phase, which was conducted to examine and calculate the psychometric characteristics of the final version of the parent-adolescent conflict questionnaire and its subscales. It is worth mentioning that in the four phases of the study, the subjects were boy and girl adolescents in the 11-18 age range. Results of the factor analysis of the questionnaire, which was performed through Principal Component Analysis and Equimax Rotation, revealed that the scale was saturated with 14 factors. The total score for both aspects of conflict had a very high internal consistency (with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients of 0.96 and 0.98 for the frequency and intensity of conflict, respectively). Furthermore, the questionnaire’s subscales scores had an acceptable internal consistency. Testretest reliability coefficients in a two-week interval were also very high. The Pearson correlation coefficients between the two administrations for the total scores of conflict frequency and intensity were 0.72 and 0.74, respectively. In the case of subscales, the test-retest reliability coefficients ranged from 0.51 to 0.78 for conflict frequency and from 0.67 to 0.79 for conflict intensity. The concurrent and convergent validity of the questionnaire was investigated via computing its correlation with Robin and Foster’s (1989) Conflict Behavior Questionnaire (CBQ-20). The correlation coefficient between the score of CBQ and the total score of conflict frequency was 0.31. This estimate was equal to 0.39 for the total score of conflict intensity and the obtained indexes were significant (p <. 01). In addition, evidence of construct validity of the parentadolescent conflict questionnaire came from the fact that distressed families obtained significantly higher averages than non-distressed families considering both the frequency and intensity of conflict.