Skip to main content

Counseling Psychology Assessment Tools

Counseling Psychology deals, amongst others, with the development and validation of assessment tools for clinical research in the domain of eating disorders, overweight and chronic diseases in childhood and youth. Existing measures may be used in research context citing the accordant source (we would appreciate your brief information on that matter).

Instrument for the identification of parental feeding strategies (ISS)

Intention
ISS is an instrument to identify parental feeding strategies. From the earliest childhood parents have many different influences on the eating behavior, the food intake and therefore on the weight status of their child. The questionnaire serves to discover explicit strategies, which parents use to teach their children a certain eating behaviour. Besides an active feeding through restricting, pressurizing or rewarding with food, also a passive feeding through modelling, monitoring and allowing morechild's control will be received. So, this instrument is using for cause analysis for overweight or eating problems as well as performance controls in prevention or intervention activities.

Procedure
The questionnaire is composed of 21 items, which contains six strategies (restriction, pressurizing, rewarding, modeling, monitoring and allowing the child more control about his food). All strategies are measured on a 5-point Likert scale with higher scores indicating a more frequent use of that scale. The duration for filling out this questionnaire is about ten minutes.

Scales
The different scales were averaged out the following items:

  1. Restriction as the extent to which mothers control their child’s food (item 1-6)
  2. Rewarding as the use of food as reward as well as the rewarding of spezial food (item 7-10)
  3. Pressure as urging their child to eat more food (item 11-13)
  4. Monitoring as overseeing their child’s eating (items 14-16)
  5. Child’s control as allowing the child to have control over its own food intake(items 17-19)
  6. Modelling as parents intentional action as a model (items 20-21)

Reliability
All scales show a good reliability (restriction α = .75; rewarding α = .77; pressure α = .84; monitoring α = .93; child’s control α = .73; modeling α = .77). The retest coefficients (retest after 2-4 weeks) were at medium range (rtt = .41 - .78).

Samples
The construction of the ISS as well as its validation took place in:

  1. A sample of 163 mothers of 3-6-year-old children:

Kröller, K. & Warschburger, P. (2009). ISS - ein Instrument zur Erfassungelterlicher Steuerungsstrategien in der Essenssituation.Diagnostica, 55, 135-143.

Additionally, we used the questionnaire in the following studies, showing satisfying structure and reliability statistics:

  1. Administering questionnaires in 219 mothers of 3-6-years-old children with ahigher risk for getting overweight:

Kröller, K. & Warschburger, P. (2008). Associations between maternal feedingstyle and food intake of children with higher risk for overweight. Appetite, 51,166-172.

  1. Administering questionnaires in 556 mothers of 1-10-years-old children:

Kröller, K. & Warschburger, P. (2009). Maternal feeding strategies and child"s food intake: Considering weight and demographic influences using structuralequation modeling. International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and PhysicalActivity, 6, 78-86.

  1. A mealtime observation on 30 mothers of 3-6-years-old children (unpublished data).

Questionnaire (PDF)

Apperance-Related Social Pressure Questionnaire (FASD)

Social influences are particularly relevant in the development of a negative body image and developmental changes during puberty make adolescents especially vulnerable for appearance-related social pressure from social agents like peers and parents.

Since measures for the broad assessment of appearance-related social impacts are lacking the FASD was developed which
a) asks for pressure in the main social contexts of adolescents, i.e. parents and peers
b) and comprises different kinds of social pressure.

The FASD comprises 32 items and was tested in children and adolescents at the age of 11 to 18 years. Apart from the use in epidemiological research, it can also provide practical implications for preventive and therapeutic approaches. Hence, it might contribute to the development of methods to enhance the school climate or healthy body-related attitudes and behavior. Further, it can support the planning and efficacy control of counselling and therapeutic processes.

How to cite and further information:
Helfert, S. & Warschburger, P. (2009). Fragebogen zum aussehensbezogenen sozialen Druck. Klinische Diagnostik und Evaluation, 3, 207-221

Questionnaire (PDF)
Test-Manual (PDF)