Psychological assessment in infancy and early childhood: The Parent-Child Relationship Scale

The importance of a multi-informant approach focused by the PDM-2 is fundamental in the assessment during early childhood, when the clinical evaluation is often supported by the contribution of parents’ perception of the children, through self-reports or interviews. Considering clinician-report tools as a rich source of information, our contribution aims to introduce a new clinician-report tool, the Parent-Child Relationship Scale, that is an observational scale which assesses the individual and the overall contribution that parents and children give to the relationship. A sample of 268 mother-child dyads was observed and assessed by several clinicians using the P-CRS after 4 or 5 sessions. The P-CRS is composed by 50 items measured on a 5-point Likert scale and suitable for children from 1 month to 6 years of age. Items are formulated to focus on Interaction, Parent and Child contribution to the relationship. The EFA conducted finds 4 dimensions for “Interaction”, 3 dimensions for “Parent” and 2 dimensions for “Child”. Moreover, many of these factors have been found well distinguish distinct aspects of the relationship among various kinds of psychopathological conditions. Our fndings may support the use of a multi-informant approach to the diagnosis during early childhood.