Parental Reflective Functioning Questionnaire (PRFQ) Test

Parents who want to understand how they interpret a child’s inner experience can use this questionnaire as a focused self-reflection exercise. The Parental Reflective Functioning Questionnaire (PRFQ) Test considers how caregivers make sense of feelings, thoughts, intentions, and behaviour during interactions. Its purpose is to make interpretations easier to notice. The results provide a parental mentalization assessment of patterns that may shape responses when a child seems hard to read.

What This Assessment Explores

The assessment examines how parents interpret a child’s inner world. Items address curiosity, perspective-taking, certainty, confusion, and perceived motives during interactions. As a reflective parenting questionnaire, it focuses on interpreting behaviour rather than whether the child is difficult.

The reported dimensions are:

• Pre-Mentalizing (1-7) measures difficulty understanding the child’s subjective inner world and a tendency to attribute inaccurate and hostile intentions to the child; Low 1-2, Moderate 3-5, High 6-7.
• Certainty (1-7) measures confidence in reading the child’s mental state while allowing doubt; Low confidence 1-3, Moderate confidence 4-5, High confidence 6-7.
• Interest and Curiosity (1-7) measures genuine interest in the mental states behind behaviour; Low curiosity 1-2, Moderate curiosity 3-5, High curiosity 6-7.

Together, the profile shows how curiosity, certainty, and attribution of inaccurate and hostile intentions to the child appear in the respondent’s parenting perspective.

Methodology and Scientific Basis

Each statement uses seven response points from Strongly disagree to Strongly agree. Items cover perspective-taking, interest in feelings, confidence in reading the child, and explanations of behaviour that may embarrass, control, or provoke the parent.

Responses are grouped into displayed dimensions and interpreted separately. A parental reflective functioning profile can show curiosity with certainty or confusion with hostile interpretations; it is a pattern across situations, not a parent-or-child label.

The published Parental Reflective Functioning Questionnaire (PRFQ) is a self-report measure of how parents think about mental states. This online self-report profile is conceptually consistent with the published PRFQ, not a standardized, normed, or validated edition.

Luyten et al. (2017) developed the PRFQ and reported preliminary validation evidence. Carlone et al. (2023) later reported reliability and validity in three samples with varying clinical risk. Steele et al. (2008) linked childhood and parenting representations in adoption, supporting the mentalization framework. These studies do not validate this online profile or establish norms or diagnostic cutoffs for it. Self-report answers can shift with stress, self-awareness, and impression management, so results are best used for reflection rather than diagnosis.