"Quality of parenting is a critical aspect of children`s development and plays an essential role in supporting children`s well-being and mental health. Family support programs are widely used in different socio-cultural contexts and implemented in different formats to help parents raise the quality of their parenting experiences. But for practitioners and stakeholders to know which family support programs are (most) useful for obtaining desirable outcome(s) in a certain socio-cultural context each program must be evaluated, which heightens the importance of choosing the appropriate instrument(s) - both in line with the goal of program and sensitive and reliable enough to be used in a particular socio-cultural context. This scoping review aims to identify instruments of parental outcomes used in evidence-based family support programs and compare the use of these instruments, their quality of standards (psychometrical properties, multi-informant, multi-method) in different cultural contexts and different populations (i.e. general, families at risk, clinical), and is in line with the position of the European Family Support Network (EurofamNet) for evidence-based family support evaluation strategies (Almeida et al., 2022). This scoping literature review considered instruments of parental outcomes measured in evidence-based family support programs reported in SCOPUS, Web of Sciences, and PsychINFO database, with publishing year between 2000 and 2022. Total of 67 articles written in English fitted the eligibility criteria, reporting mainly on studies conducted in Europe, North America and Australia. Twenty-four studies were conducted with clinical populations, 22 studies with families at risk and 21 studies with general population.
Instruments for parenting behavior were reported in 37 studies, followed by attitudes (17), mental health (17), and self-regulation (11). Regarding psychometric properties information provided by the authors was sparse. Within 67 articles, instruments varied in the frequency and socio-cultural context they were used. Out of more than 195 times instruments of parental outcomes were reported, only two thirds reported Cronbach's Alpha (CA) for the studied sample and one third did not report any information regarding CA.
Furthermore, it became evident that information regarding the CA were incomplete or missing especially in clinical and families at risk population. Reasons for observed bias in reporting psychometric properties should be more thoroughly studied and scholars are encouraged to report on the psychometric properties of the instruments used in the evaluation of family support programs in different socio-cultural settings since it is plausible that instruments proven reliable and valid in one context (e.g. general population) might be less reliable in another (e.g. at risk and/or clinical population).
Using multi-informant and multi-method methodology to lessen bias of the results, was reported approximately in less than a third of the studies. The findings are relevant in developing new methodology approaches in improving instrument quality standards in evidence-based family support programs."