The purpose of this study was to describe the strengths and needs of Deaf adults as parents of school-age and adolescent children. A cross-sectional, descriptive design was employed to gather data from a convenience sample of Deaf parents and hearing children from 15 families. The Parental Strengths and Needs Inventory (PSNI)--a 60 item Likert instrument--and structured interviews were used in data collection. The PSNI was administered to parents in sign language via videotape, and they were interviewed with the assistance of a professional interpreter. Parents' and children's total scores on the PSNI were above average according to Strom and Coolege's scoring instructions (1985). Review of subset scores indicated that Deaf parents had above average interest in acquiring additional information about childrearing, and parents of adolescents felt more than average frustration. Comparison of parents' and children's scores on parallel forms of the PSNI demonstrated no significant differences in total or subset scores, supporting validity of parents' scores. Comparison of parents' and children's interview responses with the topics on the PSNI revealed that the content on the PSNI was valid, but incomplete for Deaf parents. Deaf parents shared the concerns of normally hearing parents, but had additional concerns specific to parental deafness which were not addressed in the PSNI. Contributions of the study to Nursing research focused on strategies for triangulation and pilot testing of instruments in cross-cultural research. Limitations of the study were presented in terms of instrumentation and study design. Cautions also reported are interpretation of findings related to the ex-post-facto nature of the research design and the complexity of factors interrelated with parental Deafness.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri--Columbia, 1999. / "May 1999." Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 81-84). Also available on the Internet.

No description available.

The problem of this study was to determine the degree of relationship among parental attitudes as perceived by the child, and the child's psychological adjustment,self-concept, and sociometric status. In addition, the relationships between each of the experimental variables were examined.

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between the perception of parents as Loving-Rejecting(L-R) on the basis of the Roe-Siegleman Parent-Child Relations Questionnaire (PCR), scholastic achievement, as measured by the grade point average (GPA), and scholastic aptitude, as measured by the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT).

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin, School of Nursing, 1967. / Typewritten. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 60-61).

This study examined participants' expectations for parental and stepparental responsibilities with respect to child care. Seventy-nine female and seventy-five male participants completed the Parenting Expectations Questionnaire. Participants read a brief scenario about a first married family; a stepmother/biological father family; or a stepfather/biological mother family. They then assigned responsibility for 38 child care tasks on a 5-point scale from "man always" to "woman always". The general findings were: 1) participants assigned less responsibility to stepparents (stepmothers and stepfathers) for child care than they assigned to biological parents; 2) there was less consensus about appropriate "parental" behaviour for stepparents as compared to that for first married parents; and 3) participants with stepfamily experience assigned less responsibility to stepparents than did participants from first married families. / Arts, Faculty of / Psychology, Department of / Graduate

Clinical child psychology supposedly bridges the gap between clinical and developmental psychology. Nonetheless, there has been a dearth of communication between the two disciplines. For example, there have been no investigations as to whether various behavioral parenting techniques are differentially effective with children of different ages or whether the developmental literature on the use of rationales and modeling with children might be relevant for behavioral parent training. The purpose of this study was to examine whether maternal use of an extinction (ignoring) procedure was differentially effective depending upon the age of the child and whether its effectiveness could be enhanced by the use of verbal rationales and/or modeling procedures. Experimental sessions took place in a laboratory playroom where the mother issued a set of 20 standard commands to the child. Eighty mother-child pairs were recruited through advertisement and randomly assigned to one of four conditions: Ignoring (mothers implemented an ignoring procedure contingent upon child noncompliance), Rationale (in addition to the above, mothers provided the children with a standardized verbal rationale prior to the session), Modeling (in addition to the ignoring procedure and the rationale, mothers demonstrated the procedure to the child prior to the session), and Control (no consequences for noncompliance). Children were from one of two age ranges: 3-4% years or 5%-7% years. Observational measures of child behavior included initiated compliance (within 5 seconds), completed compliance (within 1 minute), and inappropriate behavior (whining, crying, etc.)- Interobserver agreement was at least 8770 for each behavior. A Parental Satisfaction Questionnaire was developed to assess the social validity of the various procedures. Data were analyzed by analyses of variance. With respect to both measures of compliance, children in the Rationale and Modeling groups were more compliant than children in the Control or Ignoring groups. Older children were more compliant than younger children, regardless of group. With respect to inappropriate behavior, children in the Ignoring group were significantly more inappropriate than children in the other three groups. There were no systematic effects of age. On the Parental Satisfaction Questionnaire, mothers in the Rationale and Modeling Groups were more satisfied with the parenting procedure than mothers in the Ignoring group. These results indicate that having parents provide a verbal rationale and/or model ignoring prior to its use enhances child compliance to maternal commands, reduces the extinction burst phenomenon associated with ignoring, and enhances parental satisfaction with the ignoring procedure. The procedures were equally effective with children of different ages. More generally, the results indicate the relevance of empirical research in developmental psychology for enhancing the effects of child behavior therapy. / Arts, Faculty of / Psychology, Department of / Graduate

Child abuse has been studied for the past twenty years in an attempt to define it, delineate etiology and suggest treatment modalities. Inadequate methodological controls and therapeutic assumptions incestuously shared have resulted in a theory that defines parents as bad, sick or ignorant but definitely as the culprits. More recently, sociological explanations have been written to present a psychosocial model for abuse. The purpose of this study was to explore whether a relationship exists between child abuse and a mother's knowledge of growth and development. Two groups of single parent, female headed families were chosen in the community. Twenty-three mothers participated in a thirty card growth and development sort, derived by the author from a developmental profile by Alpern and Boll (1972), indicating their understanding of when a child could first perform the behavior. The mothers were also assigned a number on an abuse continuum. The resulting data and demographic information were correlated using a Spearman Rank Order Correlation Coefficient and Chi-Squared Contingency analysis at the 0.05 level of significance. No significant relationship was found between level of abuse or knowledge of growth and development. Some significant associations were found within the demographic characteristics, with implications for study of variable clusters. / Applied Science, Faculty of / Nursing, School of / Graduate

The present study was designed to investigate the development of infants' recognition of their fathers, specifically examining the role of multisensory information (visual and auditory cues). All infants were 4-months-old and were tested in a visual-fixation preference procedure. The two measures of interest were attention and affective responsiveness. Preference was measured by the amount of time the infants watched a visual stimulus. In Experiments 1 and 2 this stimulus was the paternal face. In Experiment 2 the paternal face was also accompanied by the paternal voice. In Experiment 3, the stimulus was the maternal face plus voice. Affective responsiveness was coded for hedonic tone, interest and excitement. It was found that infants showed more positive affect towards their fathers' faces (Experiment 1) and faces plus voices (Experiment 2), p < .05. In Experiment 3, results showed that infants preferred their mothers' faces plus voices over an unfamiliar female face plus voice when the first trial was excluded from the analysis, p < .05. These findings not only support the literature on infants' recognition of their mothers, but they also contribute to the increasing body of information on infants and their fathers. The findings are interpreted as supporting the hypothesis that the developmental pattern of father recognition is qualitatively and quantitatively different from that of mother recognition. / Ph. D.