Parenting Stress Index - Fourth Edition (PSI-4)

Designed to evaluate the magnitude of stress in the parent-child system, the fourth edition of the popular PSI is a 120-item inventory that focuses on three major domains of stressor source: child characteristics, parent characteristics, and situational/demographic life stress.

The PSI-4 is commonly used as a screening and triage measure for evaluating the parenting system and identifying issues that may lead to problems in the child’s or parent’s behavior. This information may be used for designing a treatment plan, for setting priorities for intervention, and/or for follow-up evaluation. Other common settings for administration of the PSI-4 include medical centers where children are receiving medical care, outpatient therapy settings, pediatric practices, and treatment outcome monitoring.

Features and benefits

• Revised to improve the psychometric characteristics of individual items and to update item wording to more clearly tap into the target construct or behavioral pattern or to be more understandable. The original structure has been retained.
• Validation studies conducted within a variety of foreign populations, including Chinese, Portuguese, French Canadian, Finnish, and Dutch, suggest that the PSI is a robust measure that maintains its validity with diverse non-English speaking cultures.
• Expanded norms are organized by each year of child age. Percentiles—the primary interpretive framework for the PSI-4— and T scores are provided.
• One validity scale—Defensive Responding—indicates whether the parent is responding in a defensive manner.

Test structure

Two domains, Child and Parent, combine to form the Total Stress scale. The Life Stress scale provides information about the amount of parent stress caused by factors outside the parent-child relationship.

• Within the Child Domain, six subscales (Distractibility/Hyperactivity, Adaptability, Reinforces Parent, Demandingness, Mood, and Acceptability) evaluate sources of stress as gathered from the parent’s report of child characteristics.
• Within the Parent Domain, seven subscales (Competence, Isolation, Attachment, Health, Role Restriction, Depression, and Spouse/Parenting Partner Relationship) measure sources of stress related to parent characteristics.

PSI-4 Short Form

The PSI-4-SF is an abbreviated version of the full-length PSI-4.

• Thirty-six items are broken into three domains: Parental Distress (PD), Parent-Child Dysfunctional Interaction (P-CDI), and Difficult Child (DC), which combine to form a Total Stress scale.
• One simple form contains all you need for administering the measure and for scoring and profiling results.
• The PSI-4-SF's brevity allows primary health care providers to identify and target those families most in need of follow-up services. It is also ideal for use in schools, mental health clinics, and research.

Software Portfolio

THE PSI-4 SP allows you to administer either the PSI-4 or the PSI-4 SF on-screen or to hand-enter item responses from either form and produces Interpretive and Score reports. The PSI-4 SP also allows you to email an invitation to complete the PSI-4 or PSI-4 SF and helps you manage these assessments.

The PSI-4 Introductory Kit includes the Professional Manual, 10 Reusable Item Booklets, 25 Answer Sheets, and 25 Profile Forms.

The PSI-4 Short Form Kit includes the Professional Manual and 25 Short Form Record/Profile Forms.