The Play Activity Questionnaire: A parent report measure of children's play preferences

Abstract

Three studies describe the development and validation of the Play Activity Questionnaire (PQ), a parent report measure of children's play preferences. In Study 1, the 15-item PQ was completed by parents of 239 6- to 8-year-old children, and exploratory factor analysis revealed four play factors: Active and Adventurous, Athletic, Rough-and-Tumble, and Quiet. In Study 2, the factor structure was replicated with PQ data on 203 children of a broader age range (4 to 12 years). The play factors accounted for 65.7% of the variance. Boys' scores exceeded girls' scores on the Athletic and Rough-and-Tumble play factors. Girls' scores exceeded boys' scores on the Quiet play factor. Sex differences were not observed on the Active and Adventurous play factor. Interparent agreement was moderately high, and PQ factor scores were unrelated to social class or nationality. Individual factor scores showed moderate to high stability over 5 months. Validity of the play factors was examined in Study 3 by relating factor scores to measures of activity level, aggression, and sex-typed play. Play factor scores were associated with several of these measures, suggesting that the PQ is a valid measure of children's play behavior with potential applications in the fields of developmental psychopathology and psychoneuroendocrinology, and in studies of normal play and sex-role development.

Impact of Culture on Children’s Community Participation in Israel

“…Skill-based activities include gymnastics, art, singing, dancing, playing a musical instrument, writing poems and stories, and doing homework. Previous studies also emphasized the impact of parents' gender expectations (Berk, 1996;Fagot, 1978;Finegan, Niccols, Zacher, & Hood, 1991). The results of this study also show that when the cultural group-gender interaction was significant, Jewish girls had the highest participation level of all the groups.…”

Use of Home Videotapes to Confirm Parental Reports of Regression in Autism

“…Camaioni et al 1991;Dale et al 1989;Ring and Fenson 2000). Prior studies have not always found substantial agreement between parental report and observer judgment for non-language areas of development such as play (Finegan et al 1991); the current study examined consensus for several key domains of development in nonlanguage areas. Unique to the current study is the independent identification of loss/no loss for each child by both parental report and observer-coded home videotapes and the examination of agreement between these two methods in samples of children with and without ASD and autistic regression.…”

“…The Play Activity Questionnaire, a parental reported play scale, yields four factors that showed significant small to moderate positive correlations with several measures of activity level, aggression, and sextyped play (Finegan et al 1991). In another study, a moderate to high degree of concordance was found between parental reports of infants' use of particular objects as sleep aids and observer coding of sleep aid use during a total of six all-night videotape sessions.…”

Visuo‐spatial play experience: forerunner of visuo‐spatial achievement in preadolescent and adolescent boys and girls?

“…To the point is the finding that, for a majority of childhood activities, a moderate agreement has been shown between parents' and children's estimates (Ching and Dietz, 1995;Meyer-Bahlburg et al, 1985). Also, significant correlations have been measured between parental reports on children's play preferences and actual play (Finegan et al, 1991), and between similar reports on physical activities and physiological evidence of their occurrence (Sallis, 1991). Moreover, concordance between reports by the respondents and actual behavior of the persons reported about increases with the amount of joint participation in such behavior (Sudman et al, 1996).…”