Do Negative Parenting Cognitions Bias Parent Report of Preschooler’s Externalizing Symptoms? A Moderated Non-Linear Factor Analysis Approach

Parent report is frequently used to assess children’s psychopathology, however, researchers have expressed concerns about the validity of parent reports (Madsen et al., 2019; Olino et al., 2021; Richters & Pellegrini, 1989). Some parental characteristics, attitudes, or beliefs may systematically bias a parent’s report of their child’s behaviors and functioning. Informed by social information processing (SIP) models of parenting risk (Azar & Weinzierl, 2005; Azar et al., 2008; Crittenden, 1993; Milner, 1993), parents with more difficulties reflecting on and interpreting their children’s behavior may be at risk for less accurate reports. To address this, the present study conducted three regularized moderated non-linear factor analyses (Bauer et al., 2020; Bauer & Belzak, 2020; Belzak, 2023), with the LONGSCAN data to examine how parents’ self-reported negative parenting cognitions were associated with structural parameters of parent reported child aggression, delinquency, and attention problems. The findings indicated that while differential item functioning (DIF) was present on the aggression and attention problems subscales as a function of parenting cognitions, the DIF was not consistently in one direction, was small in magnitude, and did not significantly alter factor-level parameters. There was no DIF on the delinquency subscale. Given that accounting for DIF did not contribute to meaningful differences in impact parameters or improve criterion validity, findings suggest that the aggression, attention, and delinquency subscales are functionally invariant to negative parenting cognitions.