Capturing Impact Messages in Parent-Child Interactions

The interpersonal circumplex (IPC) is an established model to describe individual and dyadic interpersonal phenomena along the orthogonal dimensions of control and affiliation. This study aims to adapt and validate the Impact Message Inventory (IMI) to assess impact messages (perceptions of and covert reactions to interpersonal styles) in parents and children according to the IPC. We adapted the German IMI (Caspar et al., 2016) for a young age. Overall, 531 parents and 162 children completed the IMI@YoungAge (IMI@YA). We investigated the reliability and circumplex structure of the octant scales. We also examined the complementarity of impact messages of parents and children and associations with health-related constructs. Most IMI@YA scales demonstrated acceptable internal consistency. The expected circumplex structure could not be replicated. When using factor scores based on exploratory factor analysis, we were able to confirm the complementarity hypothesis in terms of affiliation, but not control. We detected low-to-moderate correlations with health-related constructs. The IMI@YA aims to assess the impact messages of parents and children, but the lack of circumplex structure implies that the items and scales need to be adjusted. We discuss the IPC's potential for investigating parent-child interaction.