Globally, parenting practices play a critical role in shaping children’s developmental outcomes. The literature highlights poor parenting practices such as lack of parental involvement, positive parenting, inconsistent discipline, poor monitoring, corporal punishment, and others as the most likely parenting approaches to be highly associated with disruptive behaviors in children below the age of 17 years. Given the widespread cultural variations in parenting practices, the measurement of effective parenting practices is still a major challenge across cultures, particularly those in Sub-Saharan Africa. Thus, it is important to examine the validity and cultural relevance of existing measures of parenting that have been previously validated in research globally. The absence and or failure to test and examine the validity and relevance of these measures poses a challenge to the accurate assessment of parenting when these measures are being used for research and clinical purposes in diverse cultural settings, such as those in Uganda. An example of a commonly used measure of parenting is the Alabama Parenting Questionnaire (APQ) which was developed in the United States of America by Patrick Frick and colleagues in the 1990s. Although this measure has been widely adapted for use in many cultures around the world, it has not been adapted for use in African settings, and specifically in Uganda, the country of focus in this study. The present studies sought to contribute to the larger literature on the assessment of parenting using the APQ in diverse cultural settings. In study 1, I report on findings from a qualitative examination of the cultural relevance of the 42-item APQ in a Ugandan setting. Specifically, I triangulated data through conducting semi-structured interviews with 14 local experts and 16 caregivers to understand 1) their comprehension of scale items on the APQ, and 2) important parenting practices in the target Ugandan culture. The end goal of this study was to formulate a culturally revised APQ for larger field testing in Uganda. Of the 42 APQ items, 32 items (76.2%) were revised/deleted and only 10 items (23.9%) maintained their original wording leaving a revised measure of 32 items. Specifically, major revisions (including deleting items or merging items) were conducted with 20 items (47.6%), and minor revisions (e.g., rephrasing an item, adding examples, etc.) with 12 items (28.6%). Following participant feedback, five new items were added to the revised scale to improve scale relevance. The resulting final tool had 32 items and was named the APQ-Uganda-Revised. In study 2, I examined the validity and psychometric properties of the 32-item APQ-Uganda-Revised resulting from study 1 using a sample of 618 Runyankole-speaking caregivers in Uganda. Results from study 2 suggested that a four-factor model, with 13 items (assessing dimensions of positive parenting, involvement, poor monitoring/supervision, and inconsistent discipline) was the best depiction of the APQ in Uganda. The measure was characterized by good fit, good predictive validity, and was able to show positive associations between parenting practices and children’s psychosocial functioning in a sample of Ugandan caregivers. This study represents a significant step in addressing the gaps in science around culturally relevant measurement instruments for assessing outcomes related to parenting in diverse cultural settings using the example of Uganda. Implications for the future research in parenting in Uganda are discussed.
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