Psychometric evaluation of an inventory for assessment of parental rearing practices. A Dutch form of the EMBU

Abstract

The EMBU, an instrument which was designed to assess one's memories of parental rearing behaviour, was psychometrically evaluated. Principal component factor analysis of data of a mixed sample of 841 non-institutionalized phobic individuals revealed four factors which were termed Rejection, Emotional warmth, Over-protection and Favouring subject, thereby contributing to the convergent (cross-national) reliability and validity of the structural model of perceived parental behaviour. Besides the utilization of data from aforementioned phobic sample, the scales' internal consistency was assessed in data of five additional samples, which consisted of 277 'normals', 40 agoraphobics, 29 social phobics, 21 height phobics and 38 obsessive-compulsive neurotics, and found to be very satisfactory. In the normal and mixed phobic sample, validity measures were shown to be acceptable and to be independent of the parent's sex. Furthermore, findings suggested that the fact that retrospective data is being measured with the scales does not threaten the reliability and validity of gathered information due to faulty recall or falsified accounts.