Psychometric tests of Expectations of Filial Piety Scale in a Mexican-American population

Abstract

Aims and objectives: This paper reports the development of the Expectations of Filial Piety Scale for use with Mexican-American parents regarding expectations they have of their adult children for care and support.

Background: Earlier work by the authors demonstrated that filial piety is a cross-cultural construct that can be used with Hispanic/Latino populations. More refined development of the construct required testing with more homogeneous subsets (i.e. Mexican-Americans) within the broad designation of Hispanic/Latino adults.

Design: Non-experimental methodological design for field testing of the instrument's psychometric properties.

Methods: A convenient sample of 80 Mexican-American adults in California and Texas completed a brief biographical survey and field tested the Expectations of Filial Piety Scale.

Results: Common factor analysis with orthogonal rotation was used to extract three factors, which accounted for 58% of the variance in scale scores. These factors included: I: respect for parents (24.05%); II: honouring parents (12.5%); and III: family unity (16.56%). Overall scale reliability was 0.87 with individual factor reliability coefficients ranging from 0.74 to 0.87 and test-retest correlation was 0.73.

Conclusions: The results show that the Expectations of Filial Piety Scale is an internally consistent and reliable tool for use in studies of the Mexican-American population. Mexican elders historically underuse formal services; a large portion of this population will most likely depend on support from their family members when they reach advanced ages. There is a lack of culturally sensitive instruments to measure family values in caring for older adults in Mexican-Americans.

Relevance to clinical practice: This scale can enable case workers and nurses in long-term care settings to assess the elder's expectations for family support accurately and compare these expectations with available family support, children's intentions to care for a dependent parent or other family member and the need for supplemental care in Mexican-American families.