Emerging Adulthood and Parent-Child Communication: A validation study with Perception Scale of Parenting Communication

Emerging adulthood has been described in literature as a new phase of individual and family life cycle. This new stage (18-25 years old) is characterized by identity configuration, instability, self-focused and feeling in between of emerging adults. Notwithstanding the theoretical relevance of this topic, there is a research gap about parent-child communication in this stage, perhaps because of the lack of appropriate measures. The purpose of this study was to validate a scale originally developed to assess parent-adolescent communication ( Perception Scale of Parenting Communication) to this new stage of life cycle. A cross-sectional and descriptive design was used to explore the perception of 217 emerging adults ( 68.2% females) about communication with their parents. A new version of Perception Scale of Parenting Communication was designed with 17 items distributed by four factors (parental confidence/sharing, children confidence/sharing, emotional support/affective expression, and negative communication patterns), according to confirmatory factor analysis. Results showed that Perception Scale of Parenting Communication is a valid and consistent measure (alpha=.934 mother version; alpha=.923 father version) to assess parent-emerging adult communication. This study provides important implication for research and practice such as the design of a new tool to assess family communication in emerging adulthood stage.