Assessing adolescents' information management with mothers and fathers: a brief report

Abstract

Adolescents’ information management is a fundamental topic for research on adolescence, with numerous studies using Kerr and Stattin’s (2000; Stattin & Kerr, 2000) scale or adapted versions from this tool for the assessment of this key dimension of parent-child relationships. Although this measure was initially considered to be a unidimensional scale assessing disclosure, studies later suggested a two-factor structure, making a distinction between disclosure and secrecy. The objective of this study is to analyse the factorial structure of Kerr and Stattin’s (2000) original scale of routine disclosure, including a separate analysis of the scale functioning when used to assess information management with mothers and with fathers. Participants came from a representative sample of Spanish adolescents aged 11–18 years old who had taken part in the 2014 edition of the WHO-collaborative survey Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (HBSC). Confirmatory factor analysis was performed using EQS 6.1 to compare two competing factorial structures based on the literature: one factor vs two correlated factors. Results showed that the two correlated-factors structure had a better fit to the data, both for the analysis of the maternal and paternal scales. However, one of the disclosure items also loaded on secrecy, which can be attributed to the item content. Therefore, although our results further support the differentiation between disclosure and secrecy, they also point to a possible effect of the imbalance of item content in this scale functioning, which requires attention in future research.