Practitioners, service providers and researchers are now able to measure a parent’s sense of self-efficacy faster, with the development and validation of a four-item version of the Me as a Parent scale (MaaPs).

Developed by the Parenting Research Centre, the MaaPs is an easy-to-use self-report scale that measures parents’ perceptions within four theoretical sub-traits of parenting self-regulation: self-efficacy, personal agency, self-management and self-sufficiency.

Through the validation study, authors Jan Matthews, Christine Millward, Laura Hayes and Catherine Wade found a shorter four-item version of the original 16-item scale was highly effective at measuring parenting outcomes while being more accessible to use.

The four-item version has more focus on parental self-efficacy rather than parenting self-regulation overall and is a useful tool for low-burden efficient measurement of parental self-efficacy.

The scale was originally designed to be used by service providers in an Australian context for clinical and research use, and experience in using the long-form MaaPs for program evaluation has already demonstrated the usefulness of this tool.

More information

• Read about the validation of the four-item survey: https://rdcu.be/cNWvb
• Access the original 16-item MaaPs tool
• Access the four-item MaaPs — Short Form (MaaPs-SF)