The Factorial Structure of the Quality of Relationships Inventory-Parents Perception (QRI-PP)

Abstract

Literature reports that the quality of family relationships, particularly with parents, is associated with psychopathology, namely depression, in adolescents. QRI was developed by Pierce, Sarason and Sarason (1991) and adapted to the Portuguese population by Neves and Pinheiro (2006), and the QRI-PP was created from QRI for adolescents. The present study intends to analyse the factorial structure and reliability of the Quality of Relationships Inventory - Parents Perception (QRI-PP). The sample was composed by 456 parents of adolescents with ages between 12 to 17 years. Similarly to QRI, the QRI-PP assesses the parents’ perceptions of social support, depth and conflict in the relationships with their children. The aims of the study were to conduct an exploratory factor analysis, followed by a confirmatory factor analysis to identify the factorial structure of IQRI-PP. The results obtained showed that the instrument is composed by 16 items, distributed in two factors: support/depth and conflict, with adequate Cronbach's alphas, indicating that QRI-PP is a valid instrument to analyse the parents/children quality of relationships, from the perspective of parents. A bi-factorial structure was also obtained in previous researches, conducted in Portuguese population, of the father and mother versions of QRI for adolescents (Matos, Pinheiro, Costa, & Mónico, 2015; Matos, Pinheiro, & Marques, 2013; Pinheiro, Matos, & Marques, 2013). Future studies should explore other validity indices of QRI-PP.

Keywords: IQRI-PP, quality of relationships, factorial structure

Introduction

The existence of social support is usually defined by the presence of trusted people who care about us, value and like us (Sarason, Levine, Basham, & Sarason, 1983). Therefore, it implies a persistent pattern of ties that have an important role in maintaining both physical and psychological integrity of the person (Caplan, 1974). This process, involving transactions with significant people, allows us to deal with stress and responsibilities of life in an easier way (Reis & Collins, 2000).

Social support seems to have two basic components, the perception that there are enough people to turn to in case of need, and the existence of a significant degree of satisfaction regarding the available support (Sarason et al., 1983). According to Cutrona (1989), the perception of support that a person has in a specific relationship reflects unique experiences with the other person. That originates a set of different expectations about the likelihood of receiving assistance and emotional support from that individual (Pierce, Sarason, & Sarason, 1991). In this sense, Pierce, Sarason and Sarason (1992) believe that these support expectations, related to the specific relationship or availability shown by the other, play an essential role in social interactions.

Many authors (e.g. Chandola, Marmot, & Siegrist, 2007; Cohen & Wills, 1985; Cousson-Gélie, Chalvron, Zozaya, & Lafaye, 2013; Coyne & DeLongis, 1986; House, Landis, & Umberson, 1988; Schwarzer & Knoll, 2007) make reference to the existence of an association between perception of support and health or well-being; mentioning the existence of negative correlations between physical and mental illness and social support. Cousson-Gélie et al. (2013) also refer that a greater perception of social support availability is linked to a better psychological adjustment.

Similarly, many studies report, more specifically, that less support and more conflict in family relationships, particularly with the father and the mother, are associated with psychopathology (e.g., depression) in adolescence (e.g. Cheng et al., 2014; Cole & McPherson, 1993; Hops, Lewinsohn, & Roberts, 1990; McFarlane, Bellissimo, Norman, & Lange, 1994; Sheeber, Hops, Alpert, Davis, & Andrews, 1997). This relationship between the lack of family support and depression seems to affect particularly female adolescents (Gore, Aseltine, & Colten, 1993; Slavin & Rainer, 1990).

However, until 1991, most research focused on general support perceptions, being given little attention to evaluation of specific relationships (Pierce et al., 1991). In order to solve this issue, Pierce et al. (1991), developed a tool to assess perceptions of social support specifically for each relationship, creating the Quality of Relationships Inventory (QRI). This instrument is based on the interactional-cognitive model of social support developed by Pierce, Sarason and Sarason (1990) and analyses the relationship of the adolescent with the mother, father and a friend (Pierce et al., 1991).

Authors of the original study of the QRI (Pierce et al., 1991) generated 39 items in order to evaluate the following areas: support, depth and conflict. However, 10 items were eliminated as 50% of participants' responses revealed extreme values, which compromised the variability of results. Subsequently, an exploratory factor analysis was held, using the with oblique rotation, since previous research suggested that depth and social support could be moderately or highly correlated. This resulted in a factorial structure with 3 factors and 29 items. Subsequently, 4 of these items were eliminated for having factor loadings smaller than 0.4 or that correlated with more than one factor (presented values greater than .29 in at least 2 factors). Thus, the QRI ended up with 25 items, where 12 corresponded to the Conflict factor, 7 to the Support factor and 6 to the Depth factor. These are evaluated through a 4-point Likert scale. Each factor corresponds to the mean of the score obtained by the items that constitute it.

Subscale Conflict is intended to measure if specific relationships are ambivalent or conflicting – e.g., item 6: ""; the subscale Support assesses the degree of availability of the other perceived by the individual - e.g., item 3: ""; finally, the Depth subscale is intended to measure whether the relationship is regarded as safe, important and positive – e.g., item 11: "" (Neves, 2006; Pierce et al., 1991).

In his study, Pierce et al. (1991) obtained good values of Cronbach's Alpha in the dimensions of the QRI - Conflict, Support and Depth – for the mother (.88, .83 and .83), the father (.88, .88 and .86) and for the friend (.91, .85 and .84).

The Portuguese version of the QRI is named “Inventory of Quality of Interpersonal Relationships” (IQRI) and was adapted and validated by Neves and Pinheiro (2006). In this version, specific relationships (mother, father, friend and boyfriend/girlfriend) were evaluated in college students. A similar factorial structure to that of the original authors was obtained (Pierce et al., 1991) and good Cronbach's alpha coefficients were also found (Neves, 2006).

In 2013 in Portugal, exploratory factor analyses were conducted by Matos, Pinheiro and Marques on a sample of 164 adolescents. For the relationship with the mother and the father, a factorial structure of 2 factors was found, with the elimination of item 24, and good values of Cronbach's alpha were obtained (.94 for support/depth and .88 for conflict). The same authors, on a sample of 312 adolescents, performed confirmatory factor analyses to test the model proposed by the authors of the original study (Pierce et al., 1991), which demonstrated the relevance of maintaining the 3 factors in the relations with the father and the mother, having, however, deleted some items (2, 7, 8, 9, 14, 15, 19, 24, 25 – total of 16 items; father: 2, 14, 19, 24, 25 - 20 items) (Marques, Matos, & Pinheiro, 2014; Marques, Pinheiro, Matos, & Marques, 2015). Later, in 2015, Matos, Pinheiro, Costa and Mónico, made a new exploratory and confirmatory analysis, which revealed a bi-factorial structure (support/depth and conflict) for the QRI, in father and mother versions, with the removal of items 2 and 25.

The QRI has also been translated and adapted in other countries. Nakano et al. (2002) found in a small sample of the Japanese population (40 couples), a factorial structure of 2 factors, where the depth and social support subscales were combined; Verhofstadt, Buysse, Rossel and Peene (2006) conducted a study with 286 Belgian couples and concluded that the original three-factor structure was the most suitable; Reiner, Beautel, Skaletz, Brahler and Stobel-Richter (2012), with a sample of 1494 adults, conducted the German validation of this scale, that also confirmed the tri-factorial structure of the QRI; Cousson-Gélie et al. (2013) performed a confirmatory factor analysis, in France, with 388 cancer patients, which also corroborated the original factorial structure.

Problem Statement, research question and purpose of the current study

In the present investigation, a version for parents (QRI-PP) was studied, which was developed from the IQRI, to evaluate parental perception about the relationships they maintain with their children. In this version, the items of IQRI (Neves & Pinheiro, 2006) were adapted and thus the content of items 1, 3, 5, 15, 17, 18 and 22 was reformulated so it adapted to the parents’ role. For example, in item 3 of the IQRI, adolescents evaluate their relationship with their father or their mother, regarding the following content: "To what extent could you count on this person for help with a problem?”. Therefore, in QRI-PP, this item was reformulated: "To what extent could your child count on you to help him when he has a problem”. In the reformulation of the remaining items, instead of the question being referred to the father or the mother, asking, for example, in item 14, "How critical of you is this person?”, in the version of the QRI-PP it is asked "How critical of you is your child?". The initial QRI-PP instructions are as follows: "To answer the following questions, think of the interpersonal relationship that you currently have with your child. Please tick the type of relationship you have with your child: father, mother, grandmother, grandfather, uncle or another degree of relationship. Then, thinking always in the relationship with your child, please answer every question using a scale of 1 (never or not at all) to 4 (always or very much). There are no right or wrong answers, what matters is to answer according to what you think or feel”.

We intend to study the internal consistency and the factorial structure of the QRI-PP, which is a version of the QRI for parents (Neves & Pinheiro, 2006) and that assesses Parents’ Perception of the Quality of Interpersonal Relationships they maintain with their children.

Research Methods

Findings

Confirmatory factor analysis

Based on the previous exploratory factor analysis, the verification of the proposed factorial structure was performed in a new sample.

Firstly, the absence of multivariate normality (Kline, 2011) was verified. To analyse the existence of outliers, we observed the values of the Mahalanobis distance (d²) that were of p1 and p2 < .001 (Marôco, 2010; Hair et al., 2009). Thus, 4 multivariate outliers were eliminated, which allowed arriving to a final model with better adjusted indexes (χ2/df= 1.849; CFI = .920; TLI = .906; PNFI = .723; RMSEA = .054; and SRMR = .020).

The study of modification indexes was carried out in order to figure out if it would make sense, in theory, to correlate errors that could be associated as well as to eliminate items, since some items had low factorial weights and individual reliability (cf. Figure 1). These items were 8, 13, 16 and 18 in the first factor and item 14 in the second factor. In any case, their preservation seemed relevant to measure the respective construct, taking into account their content. We also kept the original model because it presented good adjustment indexes and, when trying to remove items and correlate errors, the quality of the adjustment model became poorer. Besides, it was intended, as far as possible, to keep the factorial structure of the original authors (Pierce et al., 1991).

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Conclusions

The main purpose of this study was to analyze the dimensionality of the QRI-PP, which was built from the IQRI adolescents’ version, originally developed by Pierce et al. (1991). To confirm it, an exploratory factor analysis was performed. In our sample, a factorial structure of 2 factors was found, such as in the Japanese sample of Nakano et al. (2002), as well as in Portuguese studies previously held by Pinheiro et al. (2013), Matos et al. (2013) and Matos et al. (2015), where similar factorial structures were found. It should also be noted that the 2 factors, which in this study were gathered (support and depth), already had a high correlation coefficient (r = .61) in the original study, which may indicate some difficulties in its differentiation (Nakano et al., 2002). Theoretically, the agglutination of these two constructs also makes sense, because we tend to expect support from those with whom we maintain relationships that we value and consider more positive.

It was intended that the instrument was as similar as possible to the original structure, assuring reliability. In future studies, we intend to test the replication of the structure obtained, considering to adopt a less conservative strategy on the withdrawal of items, as well as in their reformulation. The two factors found, explained 56.62% of the total variance. Support/depth dimension was composed of 8 items, which explained 33.40% of the variance (eigenvalue 5.34); and the conflict dimension was composed of 8 items that explained 23.22% (eigenvalue 3.71).

The items that constitute the support/depth dimension of the QRI-PP (items 3, 8 and 18 – support; items 10, 11, 12, 13 and 16 – depth) and the items that are part of the conflict dimension (4, 6, 9, 14, 19, 20, 21, 23) are the same as the ones found for the factorial solution in the original studies of the QRI (Pierce et al., 1991).

A negative association between the factors was also found, which suggests that the bigger the conflict in a relationship, the lesser the perception of support and the importance that this relationship takes.

The study of internal consistency revealed good values of Cronbach's Alpha in the two dimensions (Support/Depth α = .89; Conflict α = .86), with values similar to those found by other authors (Nakano, 2002; Neves & Pinheiro, 2009; Pierce et al., 1991).

On the factorial structure obtained in the present study, regarding the QRI, the following items were eliminated: items 1, 5, 15 and 22 of the support subscale; item 17, of the depth subscale; and items 2, 7, 24 and 25, of the conflict subscale (9 items). This can be due to the fact that parents might be answering according to what they think "it's socially accepted or expected" (social desirability) and not according to their true opinion. In particular, in items from the support subscale, most of these questions refer to advising or helping (e.g., – item 1), usually considered important in the parental role. Thus, in the QRI-PP we should take into account specificities related to the influence of parental beliefs and expectations, for example, about skills that they must have and/or show, and also specificities related to the influence of feelings that can be associated with parenting as pride and guilt. However, all these issues and a review of the scale’s items should be considered in future studies of the QRI-PP.

It should also be noted that this study did not meet the results obtained in other studies carried out previously, that found a tri-factorial structure that matches the original version: in Portuguese context, studies of Neves (2006), Marques et al. (2014) and Marques et al. (2015); and internationally, studies from Verhofstadt et al. (2006), Reiner et al. (2012) and Cousson-Gélie et al. (2013).

According to the confirmatory factor analysis, it can be noted that the values of the adjustment indexes corroborate the model initially proposed. However, these results should be taken into consideration with some caution, given the low factorials weights and individual reliabilities found. It is relevant to mention that, due to its content, it was considered appropriate to keep those items that showed lower factorials weights and individual reliabilities (8, 13, 14, 16 e 18). Items 8 and 18 are items from the support dimension and question about the availability of the father to help the child in more complicated situations (e.g. death of family and interpersonal conflict). Item 13 seems to be an item that perfectly relates to the depth of a relationship (missing the relation). Item 16 makes reference to the responsibility for the welfare of the child, which is considered to be important to assess the degree of depth in a relationship of this nature. Item 14 allows you to realize how much the father think he is criticized by his son and, therefore, this item seems to be revealing of a troubled relationship with the child, being associated with conflict.

To conclude, the limitations of this study must be acknowledged. A major limitation has to do with the absence of convergent and divergent validity analysis of this version of the QRI, which must be studied in future research. Another potential limitation is related to the predominance of female responders, in the sample. It is primordial to replicate this study in more heterogeneous samples of parents, in order to be able to generalize the results. The factorial structure of the QRI-PP should also continue to be replicated, in order to get to the structure that best represents parents of adolescents from Portuguese population. Similarly, it also becomes relevant to study other versions of the scale aimed at specific populations (e.g., clinical), as well as other age groups (e.g., children, elderly). Longitudinal studies could also give us information about the stability of these relations in time. In the future, we intend to study the temporal stability of this scale.

The present study contributes to increase the existing research on the QRI, improving the evaluation and understanding of the quality of specific support relationships (parents-children), which are very important in the course of a lifetime.

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our gratitude to all the participants, to FCT that funded the study by ERDF – European Regional Development Fund through the COMPETE Program (operational program for competitiveness) and by National Funds through the FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology) within the project “Prevention of depression in Portuguese adolescents: efficacy study of an intervention with adolescents and parents” (PTDC/MHC-PCL/4824/2012) and to the Realan Foundation (USA) that currently funds the project.

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