Universals in youth’s perceptions of parental acceptance and rejection: Evidence from factor analyses within eight sociocultural groups worldwide

Abstract

Research reported here used identical factor analytic procedures on individual items in the child version of the Parental Acceptance-Rejection Questionnaire (PARQ) within each of eight sociocultural groups distributed widely around the world. Evidence and results from this research lend strong support to the presumption of con-struct validity of the PARQ as a valid cross-cultural measure of the warmth dimension of parenting. As such, the instrument may be used as an additional source of evidence for Raoul Naroll’s "tests of theories " step in socionomics. In his major lifetime work, The Moral Order, Naroll (1983) argued that weakened &dquo;moralnets&dquo; are a primary cause of 10 major per-sonal and family problems worldwide.! He included child abuse among these problems. In his &dquo;tests of theories&dquo; of child abuse, he drew heavily from our long-term program of research (Rohner,