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Abstract
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COVID‐19 has spread rapidly throughout the world and there is increased risk of child maltreatment and domestic violence due to its spread. One reason for this is that school closures force children to stay at home for longer durations, which may increase parenting stress. In Japan, all schools nationwide were temporarily closed starting on 2 March 2020. Many children had remained at home at least until the end of April 2020. The purpose of this study was to quantify parenting stress, and to understand the qualitative structure of parenting stress through textual analysis during this unprecedented situation.
The sample included 353 parents aged 23-58 years (mean = 37.60 years, SD = 6.11 years; 78 males, 273 females, and two sexes unknown). The mean age of the eldest child was 8.04 years (SD = 4.62 years, range = 0-18 years), and the mean age of the youngest child was 6.11 years (SD = 4.66 years, range = 0-18 years). All information gathered was processed anonymously. The study protocol and all procedures were approved by the Ethics Committee of the University of Fukui, Japan (Assurance # FU‐20200007). The survey was conducted entirely on the Web between 29 and 30 April 2020. All participants were recruited using Crowdworks (a crowdsourcing service in Japan). Participants saw the advertisement and applied to participate using the crowdsourcing service. We then sent the survey questionnaire form to participants who met the requirements for participation (living with their children aged 0-18 years who were under school closure). Informed consent for participation was obtained from all participants prior to starting the survey.
The Parenting Stress Index - Short Form (PSI‐SF) was used to measure parenting stress; this is composed of 36 items with a Likert‐type answer format of five options. We adapted a bifactorial structure (the Parental Distress subscale and the Childrearing Stress subscale) based on a recent validation study. Participants were asked to complete the PSI‐SF twice. First, the participants answered the PSI‐SF without any particular instructions. Following completion, they were then asked to complete the PSI‐SF again, recalling what it was like before the school closures had begun. In addition to the PSI‐SF, participants were asked if it would be possible to handle parenting‐related stress if the school closures continued into the future using a single item. This result is reported...
Language: en |