Structural validity and internal consistency of the Strengths and Stressors in Parenting (SSF) Questionnaire in parents of children with developmental disabilities

Abstract

The current study investigated the structural validity and internal consistency of the Strengths and Stressors (SSF) questionnaire. The SSF is used in Swedish habilitation services to measure the positive and negative consequences that the fostering of a child with a developmental disability can have on family functioning in six domains: parent's feelings and attitudes, social life, family finances, relationship to the other parent, siblings, and professional support. The proposed six‐factor model was tested with confirmatory factor analysis with data collected from 291 parents of children with developmental disabilities. The six‐factor model had an acceptable fit according to most fit indices, but two items were non‐significant. Overall, the internal consistency was acceptable or good. The SSF, with the proposed six‐factor solution, can be a useful tool when assessing parental perspectives on the impacts of having a child with a developmental disability in clinical settings and research.

Parenting children with disabilities in Sweden: a cluster-analysis of parenting stress and sufficiency of informal and formal support

“…However, the small sample size did not allow for such sub-analyses and instead the ratings of positively phrased items were reversed for the current study. Yet, low scores on positively phrased items may not necessarily equate to high negative scores (Ivarsson et al, 2023).…”

“…The Strengths and Stressors in Parenting questionnaire (SSF; Ternert and Falck, 2016;Ivarsson et al, 2023) is a Swedish validated development of the Family Impact Questionnaire (Donenberg and Baker, 1993). This self-rating scale for parents, measures effects of child disability on six subscales, rated on a four-point Likert type scale [from "not at all" (0) to "very much" (3)].…”