Parental Attitudes Questionnaire in Families With a Child With Special Needs Test
How the Scales are Structured
Who Usually Takes This Test?
See How You Compare
Below is a preview of how scores are typically distributed across each scale.
Example Questions From the Test
- Yes
- No
- Yes
- No
- Yes
- No
Parental Attitudes Questionnaire in Families With a Child With Special Needs Test - Description and methodology of the test
Parents who want to examine how they respond to family life with a child who has special needs can use this questionnaire as a structured point of reflection. The Parental Attitudes Questionnaire in Families With a Child With Special Needs Test focuses on emotional connection, strain, involvement, and expectations. As a parental attitude assessment, this questionnaire can help a parent identify themes worth discussing in family support.
What This Assessment Explores
The items examine how a parent experiences closeness, responsibility, stress, and confidence in the child’s abilities. They address affection, irritation, protectiveness, involvement in education, and beliefs about independence, discipline, development, and future achievement. As a special needs parenting assessment, it describes the parent’s perspective rather than evaluating the child.
The result is one profile, Parental Attitudes in Families With a Child With Special Needs, scored from 0-100. The displayed bands are More strained (0-33), Mixed / variable (34-66), and More supportive (67-100). They show the general direction of reported attitudes, while individual answers may reflect both support and difficulty.
The following dimensions show what the profile can clarify:
- Warmth and sympathy show the parent’s affection and concern.
- Strain and irritation indicate emotional pressure in difficult interactions.
- Expectations and judgments reflect beliefs about ability, behavior, and development.
- Involvement and protection describe participation, monitoring, and closeness.
Methodology and Scientific Basis
Each statement is answered Yes or No, making this a structured self-report measure of feelings, beliefs, and parenting situations. Binary choices keep the task direct but can compress experiences that vary across contexts.
The questionnaire produces one overall score. Its bands organize the result into three descriptions; for this online questionnaire, the contribution of each Yes/No answer, any reverse-keying, and any weighting are unspecified, so the 0-100 range should not be used to infer a point rule.
The closest published comparison is the 2017 modification by Galasyuk and Mitina concerning parental attitudes in families raising a child with special needs. Conceptually, this online questionnaire is consistent with that work and the Varga-Stolin parental attitudes questionnaire, not a direct adaptation. The related 2018 study also addresses these themes, while this version has no stated norms, reliability estimates, or clinical cutoffs.
Interpretation is strongest when read with the respondent’s circumstances in mind. Used as a family support assessment, this questionnaire can help organize themes for discussion, while self-report is sensitive to mood, stress, memory, self-awareness, and the wish to appear favorable. The result reflects a perspective, not a diagnosis.
- Galasyuk, I. N., & Mitina, O. V. (2017). The Modification of the Parental Attitudes Questionnaire (A. Varga, V. Stolin) for the Family with the Child with Mental Disabilities. Clinical Psychology and Special Education, 6(2), 109-129. 10.17759/cpse.2017060209
- Galasyuk, I. N., & Mitina, O. V. (2018). Parental Attitude in Families with a Special Child. Psychological Science and Education, 23(4), 102-111. 10.17759/pse.2018230410
- Varga, A. Ya., & Stolin, V. V. (1988). Test Questionnaire of Parental Attitude. In Workshop on Psychodiagnostics, pp. 107-113. Moscow: Moscow State University Press.
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