The Development of the Parenting Alliance Inventory

The purpose of this study was to develop a measure of the parenting alliance developed by R.R. Abidin (1966). The Parenting Alliance Inventory (Abidin, 1986) assesses the degree to which a husband and wife feel good about their parenting skills as well as the parenting skills of their partner, and the degree to which each spouse supports the other in the task of parenting. The Parenting Alliance Inventory is based on the psychoanalytic principles outlined by Weissman and Cohen (1964) who described the "parenting alliance" as that part of the concerned parenthood and child rearing, and which is distinct from the libidinal object needs of the spouses for each other.

The Parenting Alliance Inventory proved to have high internal consistency. All 30 items of the instrument correlated highly with each other with an alpha reliability of .97. A factor analysis did not reveal factors in the Parenting Alliance Inventory that would have independent predictive validity, although various factors were found that were psychologically distinct. There does not appear to be a significant difference between the responses of men and women to the Parenting Alliance Inventory. The Parenting Alliance Inventory was found to discriminate accurately between couples who are married, separated, and divorced.

In a manner consistent with its hypothesized nature, the Parenting Alliance Inventory correlated significantly with established measures of marital satisfaction, parenting stress, and parenting style. In addition, the Parenting Alliance Inventory correlated significantly with dependent child outcome measures of positive adjustment, popularity, social competence, and self-esteem. Hierarchical models of regression and lisrel programs indicated that warm parenting behavior is a more significant predictor of child adjustment than the parenting alliance or marital satisfaction. In general, the Parenting Alliance Inventory established an initial base of concurrent, discriminant, and external validity. Due to the instrument's numerous associations with family adjustment, ranging from parental attachment to the child's social competence, the Parenting Alliance Inventory is recommended to clinicians working with families and to researchers studying the determinants of parenting.