Assessing Parental Readiness to Change: A Psychometric Evaluation of the READI-SF in a Community Sample

Abstract

Engagement in parent training continues to be a barrier to service delivery (Brestan & Eyberg, 1998; Chacko, Wymbs, Chimiklis, Wymbs, & Pelham, 2012; Eyberg, Nelson, & Boggs, 2008; Miller & Prinz, 2003; Nock & Kazdin, 2005; Steiner & Remsing, 2007). Parent training programs place a high level of action-oriented demands on caregivers, thus readiness to change parenting behaviors may be especially important in engagement and retention (Chaffin et al., 2009; Miller & Prinz, 2003). Preventive parent training models have demonstrated efficacy for reducing disruptive behavior in young children (Greenberg, Domitrovich, & Bumbarger, 2001; O'Connell, Boat, & Warner, 2009; Steiner & Remsing, 2007) and may reduce barriers to engagement by providing wider accessibility of services (Becker et al., 2015; Garvey et al., 2006; Gopalan et al., 2010; Lindsey et al., 2014). The transtheoretical model has informed the creation of motivational enhancement programs that have demonstrated positive effects on engagement and client outcomes in parent training interventions (Chacko et al., 2012; Chaffin et al., 2009; Ingoldsby, 2010; Nock & Kazdin, 2005). Evidence suggests that these interventions may be most effective when tailored to families’ treatment readiness at service initiation (Chaffin et al., 2009). Measures of parental readiness are needed to inform treatment tailoring and maximize agencies’ limited therapy resources; however, measures of this construct have been understudied in the literature to date. Notably, all measures of this construct have been tested within clinical samples, and examination of these measures within community populations is warranted in order to maximize the utility of parental readiness measures across contexts (Flay et al., 2005; Fok & Henry, 2015; Gottfredson et al., 2015; Proctor & Brestan-Knight, 2016). The present study examines the performance of one parental readiness measure, the Readiness, Efficacy, Attributions, Defensiveness, & Importance Scale – Short Form (READI-SF) in a community-based sample. The current study examines the psychometric properties and factor structure of the READI-SF as well as indices of reliability and validity. Lastly, the study examines additional factors that may impact ratings of parent readiness, like child disruptive behavior and other familial factors. Limitations and future directions are discussed.