The Early Parenting Attitudes Questionnaire (EPAQ) is a short, psychometrically-valid instrument for assessing adults' beliefs about parenting and child development. The PAQ measures three subscales: rules and respect, affection and attachment, and early learning. Our goals in designing the EPAQ were to create a short instrument that could 1) measure population-level differences in attitudes, 2) be used as a moderator in experimental and intervention studies on caregiving behaviors, and 3) be used as an outcome variable for caregiving belief- and behavior-change interventions.
The PAQ has 24 items (8 per subscale, 12 reverse coded) and can be given online or on paper. Spanish and French translations are available, but have not been validated as extensively. It has subscale reliabilities of alpha = .69 (rules and respect), .75 (affection and attachment), and .76 (early learning), respectively.
Scale construction and validity evidence is described in Hembacher & Frank (2020), Collabra: Psychology.
PDF version of the EPAQ Word verson of the EPAQ
Google forms English version of the EPAQ - Note, please MAKE A COPY of the EPAQ form rather than trying to edit this one directly (or using it to collect your own data!).
- Danish - courtesy of Christina Dideriksen, note four extra questions about child-directed speech at the end
- French - courtesy of Rebecca Shankland and Christina Bergmann
- Greek - courtesy of Elena Averkiou
- Russian - courtesy of Natalia Kartushina and Margarita Gavrilova
- Spanish
- Ukranian
We are very happy for you to translate the form, but we ask that you share it back to us for posting on this website. We also ask that you maintain the CC-BY 4.0 license as shown below.
Users should be aware of data that the EPAQ may not perform identically across cultures, see this preprint by Allegretta et al.
EPAQ is currently scored by compiling the sumscores for each subscale. More sophisticated scoring methods could in principle lead to better scores, and we welcome work in this direction.
Research and development of the EPAQ was supported by a generous gift from Kinedu.
The original repository for the paper can be found here and an OSF repository archives some raw materials and preprints.
For more information, contact Michael Frank.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. It can be shared and adapted, but you must acknowledge the original by citing the paper above.
