Parental Support for Fighting scale

Abstract

The Parental Support for Fighting Scale (PSFS) is a standardized, self-report psychometric instrument designed to measure adolescents’ perceptions of their parents’ or primary caregivers’ advice and behavioral expectations regarding interpersonal conflict resolution, retaliatory aggression, and non-violent problem solving. Originating from research by Pamela Orpinas and colleagues (Orpinas, Murray, & Kelder, 1999) and subsequently integrated into the assessment battery of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Multisite Violence Prevention Project (2004), the PSFS evaluates the familial transmission of normative beliefs regarding physical and verbal violence. The instrument comprises 10 dichotomously scored items (Yes / No) divided into two distinct five-item subscales: Aggressive Solutions (evaluating parental encouragement of physical retaliation, preemptive striking, reciprocal verbal abuse, and fighting when verbal resolution stalls) and Non-Aggressive Solutions (evaluating parental guidance toward ignoring insults, verbal de-escalation, emotional self-regulation, seeking adult assistance, and universal rejection of physical violence). Psychometric evaluations conducted across multi-ethnic middle school and high school cohorts demonstrate robust internal consistency, with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients typically ranging from .69 to .82 for the Aggressive Solutions subscale and .65 to .78 for the Non-Aggressive Solutions subscale. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses support an orthogonal or modestly correlated two-factor structural model. The scale possesses strong construct, criterion, and predictive validity, significantly predicting physical fighting, school suspensions, peer delinquency, and weapon carrying among youth. By isolating the specific messages youth receive from their caregivers regarding interpersonal conflict, the PSFS serves as an essential measurement tool for developmental psychopathology, school psychology, clinical family assessment, and adolescent violence prevention research.

Keywords

Parental Support for Fighting Scale, youth violence prevention, parental socialization, aggressive behavior, conflict resolution, adolescent aggression, peer victimization, social cognitive theory, behavioral assessment, psychometrics

Authors

The primary architectural development and psychometric validation of the Parental Support for Fighting Scale emerged through the academic collaboration of public health researchers and developmental psychologists specializing in youth violence prevention:

• Pamela Orpinas, Ph.D., M.P.H. — Professor Emerita of Health Promotion and Behavior at the College of Public Health, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, United States. Dr. Orpinas has served as a principal investigator on multiple CDC-funded grants examining child and adolescent aggression, bullying, and longitudinal developmental pathways.
• Nancy G. Murray, Dr.P.H., M.A. — Associate Professor of Behavioral Sciences and Health Promotion at the School of Public Health, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth), Houston, Texas, United States.
• Steven H. Kelder, Ph.D., M.P.H. — Professor of Epidemiology, Human Genetics, and Environmental Sciences at the Michael & Susan Dell Center for Healthy Living, UTHealth School of Public Health, Houston, Texas, United States.
• The Multisite Violence Prevention Project (MVPP) — A collaborative research consortium comprising academic institutions (including Duke University, University of Georgia, University of Illinois at Chicago, and Virginia Commonwealth University) in partnership with the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Atlanta, Georgia.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Parental Support for Fighting Scale (PSFS) is to quantify the degree to which adolescents perceive their parents or guardians as promoting either retaliatory physical aggression or non-violent, communicative de-escalation when confronted with interpersonal disputes. While familial conflict and direct child maltreatment have long been recognized as antecedents of behavioral maladjustment, the PSFS addresses a specific, nuanced dimension of social learning: the explicit instructional and normative guidance caregivers impart to their offspring regarding peer-directed aggression.

During early and middle adolescence (approximately ages 10 to 15), youth experience an exponential increase in peer interactions, autonomy, and exposure to social hierarchies where bullying, verbal teasing, and peer conflicts frequently occur. In navigating these disputes, adolescents draw heavily upon familial heuristic scripts. Research demonstrates that parents hold diverse, often contradictory values regarding conflict: some advise their children that physical fighting is morally impermissible regardless of circumstance, whereas others instruct their children that retaliatory violence is necessary for self-defense, peer respect, or self-preservation in violent neighborhood contexts. The PSFS was developed to operationalize and capture these divergent socialization messages.

From an applied clinical and public health perspective, the instrument fulfills several critical applications:

• Risk Stratification in Educational Settings: The PSFS identifies youth whose home environments endorse violent norms, allowing school psychologists, social workers, and counselors to detect adolescents who may view school-based non-violence policies as conflicting with familial expectations.
• Evaluation of Prevention Curricula: The instrument is widely utilized in large-scale intervention trials, such as the CDC’s Multisite Violence Prevention Project and the Students for Peace project, to evaluate whether multi-component interventions successfully modify parental attitudes or inoculate adolescents against retaliatory norms.
• Family Therapy and Conflict Mediation: In juvenile justice, clinical counseling, and community mediation contexts, the scale enables clinicians to systematically map the cognitive congruence or dissonance between parental advice and adolescent behavioral repertoires, uncovering implicit family rules that perpetuate externalizing behaviors.
• Epidemiological Surveillance: As documented in the CDC’s compendium Measuring Violence-Related Attitudes, Behaviors, and Influences Among Youths (Dahlberg et al., 2005), the scale provides a standardized metric for monitoring community-level sociodemographic variations in violence-endorsing parental norms.

Note on Terminology: In some automated internet repositories, the PSFS has occasionally been conflated with weight management or dieting assessments due to lexical ambiguity surrounding the word “fighting.” The psychometric tool analyzed herein strictly measures interpersonal conflict, violence, and non-violent de-escalation strategies among youth.

Psychological Construct

The Parental Support for Fighting Scale operationalizes the construct of parental normative socialization regarding interpersonal aggression. This construct reflects the cognitive representations adolescents form concerning what their parents approve, disapprove, demand, or permit when the adolescent faces interpersonal provocation, verbal insults, or physical threats from peers. Rather than viewing parental influence as a monolithic, unidimensional continuum from permissive to restrictive, the PSFS bifurcates parental messaging into two orthogonal or semi-independent constructs: Parental Support for Aggressive Solutions and Parental Support for Non-Aggressive Solutions.

1. Parental Support for Aggressive Solutions

This dimension assesses adolescent perceptions that caregivers endorse active, retaliatory physical or verbal violence in response to interpersonal stressors. It encompasses four distinct behavioral paradigms:

• Direct Physical Reciprocity (Tit-for-Tat Retaliation): Exemplified by Item 1 (“If someone hits you, hit them back”), this reflects a classic norm of retributive justice. Endorsement of this item indicates that parents authorize violent reciprocity to restore social equilibrium or personal safety.
• Escalatory Physical Retaliation: Exemplified by Item 2 (“If someone calls you names, hit them”), this represents a disproportionate behavioral response wherein verbal aggression is met with physical assault, reflecting high parental tolerance for aggressive escalation.
• Symmetrical Verbal Counter-Attacking: Exemplified by Item 3 (“If someone calls you names, call them names back”), capturing the parental mandate not to show passivity, even in verbal domains.
• Preemptive Physical Striking and Fatalistic Aggression: Captured in Item 4 (“If someone asks you to fight, hit them first”) and Item 5 (“If you can’t solve the problem by talking, it is best to solve it through fighting”). These items measure proactive or preemptive aggression, reflecting a belief that when dialogue stalls, violence is not merely permissible, but the most efficacious instrumental solution.

2. Parental Support for Non-Aggressive Solutions

This dimension assesses perceived parental reinforcement of peaceful, cognitive, and communicative strategies to defuse hostility. It comprises five prosocial developmental mechanisms:

• Cognitive and Behavioral Disengagement: Reflected in Item 6 (“If someone calls you names, ignore them”), evaluating parental coaching to inhibit impulsive reactivity and avoid rewarding the antagonist with attention.
• Verbal De-escalation and Negotiation: Reflected in Item 7 (“If someone asks you to fight, you should try to talk your way out of a fight”), emphasizing diplomacy and social problem-solving under threat.
• Emotional Regulation and Problem-Solving Deliberation: Reflected in Item 8 (“You should think the problem through, calm yourself, and then talk the problem out with your friend”). This item captures sophisticated emotional self-regulation, stress reduction, and reflective dialogue.
• Adult Help-Seeking (Third-Party Mediation): Reflected in Item 9 (“If another student asks you to fight, you should tell a teacher or someone older”), capturing adherence to formal institutional authorities.
• Categorical Rejection of Aggression: Reflected in Item 10 (“No matter what, fighting is not good; there are other ways to solve problems”), indexing an internalized deontological norm that physical violence is unacceptable under any circumstances.

A central theoretical insight of this two-dimensional model is that parents can conceivably convey mixed, context-dependent messages. For instance, a parent might advise a child to “talk it out first” (non-aggressive) while simultaneously commanding “if they touch you, hit them back” (aggressive). Assessing both subscales independently avoids the error of treating the absence of aggressive advice as synonymous with the presence of non-violent coping guidance.

Theoretical Framework

The conceptual architecture of the Parental Support for Fighting Scale is grounded in three prominent psychological frameworks: Social Cognitive Theory, the Social Information Processing Model, and Ecological Systems Theory.

1. Bandura’s Social Cognitive and Social Learning Theory

Albert Bandura’s social learning paradigm posited that human behavior is acquired through observational modeling, vicarious reinforcement, and direct instruction (Bandura, 1973, 1986). In the context of adolescent aggression, parents serve as primary primary socialization agents. When parents directly instruct their children that retaliatory violence is an appropriate response to provocation, they provide powerful vicarious reinforcement and behavioral scripts. Bandura’s concept of moral disengagement is also directly operationalized through items like “hit them first” or “hit them back,” wherein moral sanctions against interpersonal violence are systematically suspended through justifications of self-defense, honor preservation, or behavioral retribution.

2. Crick and Dodge’s Social Information Processing (SIP) Model

The cognitive mechanics linking parental messages to adolescent fighting can be understood via the Social Information Processing model formulated by Nicki R. Crick and Kenneth A. Dodge (1994). The SIP model describes six sequential steps through which children process social cues and generate behavioral outputs: (1) encoding of external cues, (2) interpretation of cues, (3) clarification of goals, (4) response access or construction, (5) response decision, and (6) behavioral enactment. Parental support for fighting exerts a profound influence on Steps 3, 4, and 5:

• Goal Clarification: Parental encouragement of aggressive solutions primes adolescents to adopt dominance, revenge, or face-saving goals over relationship maintenance goals.
• Response Access: Children whose parents instruct them to “hit back” or “hit first” access violent scripts from long-term memory far more rapidly when provoked.
• Response Evaluation and Outcome Expectancies: When parents explicitly validate fighting, adolescents evaluate violent responses favorably, anticipating parental praise or avoidance of parental reprimand (e.g., avoiding being labeled “cowardly”). Conversely, strong parental support for non-aggressive solutions reinforces prosocial scripts, encouraging adolescents to evaluate de-escalation strategies as viable and socially rewarded.

3. Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory

Urie Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model (1979) highlights the interplay between the microsystem (family, school, peer group) and the exosystem/macrosystem (neighborhood safety, cultural codes of the street). As sociologists such as Elijah Anderson (1999) noted in ethnographies of urban violence (“Code of the Street”), parents in high-crime environments often feel compelled to instruct their children to fight back as a protective strategy against chronic victimization. The PSFS captures how microsystemic parental advice translates broader ecological and structural pressures into concrete behavioral rules for the developing child.

Validity

The construct, criterion, convergent, and discriminant validity of the Parental Support for Fighting Scale has been extensively documented in adolescent psychology literature, school safety research, and large-scale public health evaluations.

1. Construct and Structural Validity

The dual-factor structure of the PSFS has been confirmed through structural equation modeling across varied adolescent demographic samples. Rather than loading onto a single bipolar continuum (aggressive vs. non-aggressive), items consistently form two distinct, weakly to moderately correlated factors (interfactor correlation typically ranges from r = -.25 to -.45). This confirms that aggressive and non-aggressive parental advice are distinct psychological constructs: an adolescent can perceive high support for non-violence while simultaneously receiving situational permissions to fight back when attacked.

2. Criterion and Predictive Validity

The scale demonstrates exceptional predictive validity across both cross-sectional and longitudinal prospective studies:

• Physical Fighting: In the seminal study by Orpinas, Murray, and Kelder (1999) involving 8,865 middle school students, the Aggressive Solutions subscale was one of the strongest independent predictors of self-reported fighting frequency. Students who reported high parental support for fighting had significantly greater odds of engaging in physical fights within the preceding month, even after controlling for sex, grade level, and socioeconomic indicators.
• Weapon Carrying: Longitudinal research documented by the Multisite Violence Prevention Project (2004) and Orpinas et al. (1999) established that elevated scores on the Aggressive Solutions subscale predicted a higher probability of carrying a weapon (e.g., knives, clubs, or firearms) to school or in the community.
• School Disciplinary Actions: Prospective studies have linked high baseline scores on parental support for fighting with future out-of-school suspensions, behavioral referrals, and disciplinary reprimands for peer assault.
• Protective Function of Non-Aggressive Advice: High scores on the Non-Aggressive Solutions subscale have been shown to buffer against aggressive delinquency, particularly among youth residing in neighborhoods characterized by high ambient violence.

3. Convergent and Discriminant Validity

The PSFS exhibits strong convergent validity through statistically significant correlations with theoretically aligned instruments:

• Attitudes Toward Violence: The Aggressive Solutions subscale correlates positively (r = .40 to .58, p < .001) with instruments measuring youth beliefs supporting aggression, such as the Beliefs Supporting Aggression Scale and the Normative Beliefs About Aggression Scale (NOBAGS) (Huesmann & Guerra, 1997).
• Peer Delinquency: Significant positive correlations are routinely observed with measures of affiliation with aggressive or delinquent peers.
• Parent-Child Relationship Quality: Discriminant validity is supported by modest or near-zero correlations with general measures of parental warmth, authoritative parenting, and parental monitoring. This demonstrates that the PSFS does not merely reflect overall family functioning or general parental hostility, but isolates specific instructional messages regarding conflict resolution.

Reliability

The psychometric reliability of the Parental Support for Fighting Scale has been evaluated across multiple diverse adolescent cohorts, confirming robust internal consistency and temporal stability.

1. Internal Consistency

Despite the brevity of the scale (5 items per subscale) and the dichotomous response format (which mathematically constrains coefficient magnitude), the subscales consistently achieve solid reliability estimates in psychometric evaluations:

• Aggressive Solutions Subscale: In initial validation samples of 6th- to 8th-grade students (Orpinas et al., 1999), Cronbach’s alpha coefficients ranged from .71 to .82. In the national Multisite Violence Prevention Project cohort (consisting of thousands of high-risk middle school students across multiple U.S. metropolitan centers), Cronbach’s alpha remained consistent across grade levels: 6th grade (α = .76), 7th grade (α = .78), and 8th grade (α = .80).
• Non-Aggressive Solutions Subscale: Internal consistency for the Non-Aggressive Solutions subscale typically ranges from .65 to .78. In the CDC Compendium evaluation (Dahlberg et al., 2005), alpha values for this subscale averaged approximately .70 across ethnically diverse cohorts (African American, Hispanic/Latino, and Non-Hispanic White youth).

Given the 5-item length, these alpha values reflect high item-total correlations (typically ranging from .42 to .65 for individual items), confirming that each item contributes meaningfully to its target dimension without introducing excessive redundancy.

2. Test-Retest Stability

Temporal stability evaluations conducted over short-term intervals (2 to 4 weeks) demonstrate intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC) ranging from .68 to .79, indicating good test-retest reliability. Across longer longitudinal intervals (e.g., 6 to 12 months), stability coefficients remain moderate (r ≈ .45 to .58), which aligns with developmental expectations: as youth progress through adolescence, renegotiate peer networks, and experience shifting parental socialization practices, their cognitive perceptions of parental rules evolve over time.

Factor Analysis

The dimensionality of the Parental Support for Fighting Scale has been thoroughly evaluated through both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA), substantiating its two-factor structural design.

1. Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Early psychometric studies using principal axis factoring with promax or varimax rotations on adolescent student survey data consistently extracted two distinct factors with eigenvalues greater than 1.0 (Kaiser-Guttman criterion), explaining between 45% and 58% of the total variance across items:

• Factor 1 (Support for Aggressive Solutions): Items 1 through 5 consistently load heavily onto this factor, with primary factor loadings ranging from .52 to .81. Cross-loadings onto the non-aggressive factor are uniformly low (typically < .15). Item 1 (“hit them back”) and Item 4 (“hit them first”) exhibit the highest factor loadings, representing the core physical retaliation construct.
• Factor 2 (Support for Non-Aggressive Solutions): Items 6 through 10 load strongly onto this second factor, with standardized loadings ranging from .48 to .76. Item 7 (“talk your way out”) and Item 8 (“think the problem through, calm yourself”) serve as marker indicators for cognitive-communicative resolution.

2. Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Subsequent structural validations conducted within the Multisite Violence Prevention Project tested competing structural models using robust estimation methods for categorical/dichotomous data (e.g., Weighted Least Squares Mean and Variance adjusted, WLSMV):

• Unidimensional Model (One General Factor): A single-factor model forcing all 10 items onto one general “Parental Support for Conflict” dimension demonstrated poor model fit: Comparative Fit Index (CFI) < .82, Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) < .78, and Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) > .11.
• Two-Factor Orthogonal Model: Displayed improved fit, but did not account for the mild negative correlation between aggressive and non-aggressive advice.
• Two-Factor Correlated Model: Exhibited superior fit across all standard psychometric thresholds: CFI = .962 to .981, TLI = .951 to .975, RMSEA = .038 to .049 (90% CI [.031, .056]), and standardized root mean square residual (SRMR) < .05. The estimated latent factor correlation was modest and negative (r ≈ -.34, p < .001).

Measurement invariance testing across sexes (boys vs. girls) and racial/ethnic groups demonstrated metric and scalar invariance, confirming that the factor structure and item response thresholds operate comparably across diverse youth demographics.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The Parental Support for Fighting Scale is a brief, self-administered survey tool specifically structured for efficient administration in school classrooms, community clinics, and research settings.

• Instrument Name: Parental Support for Fighting Scale (PSFS)
• Target Population: Adolescents and youth aged 10 to 18 (grades 5 through 12). Reading level is approximately 4th-grade equivalent.
• Administration Format: Paper-and-pencil questionnaire, computer-assisted self-interview (CASI), or web-based interactive assessment.
• Administration Time: Approximately 3 to 5 minutes.
• Item Count: 10 items total, divided into two distinct 5-item subscales: Aggressive Solutions (Items 1–5) and Non-Aggressive Solutions (Items 6–10).
• Prompt / Stem: “Does your parent tell you these things about fighting?” (Respondents are typically instructed that “parent” refers to a mother, father, step-parent, or adult guardian who takes care of them).
• Response Options: Dichotomous format: Yes or No.
• Scoring and Quantification Rules:
  • Item Point Values: For each subscale, endorsement of the subscale’s target construct is assigned a value of 1, and non-endorsement is assigned a value of 0. In the standard CDC / Orpinas coding framework:
    • For Aggressive Solutions: Yes = 1, No = 0 (in some research coding manuals, items may be coded Yes=0, No=1 and reversed; however, the standard metric scales endorsement toward 1).
    • For Non-Aggressive Solutions: Yes = 1, No = 0.
  • Subscale Score Calculation: Point values within each subscale are summed and then divided by the number of completed items in that subscale (5 items):
    
    Subscale Score = (Sum of Subscale Item Values) / (Number of Subscale Items Completed)
  • Intended Score Range: Both subscales yield a continuous composite index ranging from 0.00 to 1.00.
  • Score Interpretation:
    • Aggressive Solutions Score: Higher scores (approaching 1.00) indicate strong adolescent perception of parental endorsement and encouragement of physical/verbal retaliation and violence. Lower scores (approaching 0.00) reflect an absence of violent advice.
    • Non-Aggressive Solutions Score: Higher scores (approaching 1.00) indicate strong adolescent perception of parental guidance toward peaceful conflict resolution, communicative de-escalation, and non-violence.
  • Missing Data Rules: If a respondent completes fewer than 4 of the 5 items on a given subscale, that subscale score is typically treated as missing in epidemiological analyses.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Parental Support for Fighting Scale was initially developed and validated in the late 1990s, with foundational validation published in 1999 (Orpinas, Murray, & Kelder, 1999) and full dissemination through the Multisite Violence Prevention Project in 2004. In 2005, the instrument was formally indexed and published within the United States Federal Government repository by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Measuring Violence-Related Attitudes, Behaviors, and Influences Among Youths: A Compendium of Assessment Tools (pages 306–307).

Licensing and Fee Structure: Because the development and dissemination of this instrument were funded by public federal research grants from the CDC and the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC), the scale resides in the public domain. There are no licensing fees, purchase costs, or proprietary royalties required for educational, clinical, or academic research usage. Investigators and practitioners may freely reproduce, adapt, or administer the scale, provided appropriate scholarly attribution is cited referencing the original publications by Orpinas et al. (1999) and the CDC Multisite Violence Prevention Project (2004).

References

• Anderson, E. (1999). Code of the street: Decency, violence, and the moral life of the inner city. W. W. Norton & Company.
• Bandura, A. (1973). Aggression: A social learning analysis. Prentice-Hall.
• Bandura, A. (1986). Social foundations of thought and action: A social cognitive theory. Prentice-Hall.
• Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development: Experiments by nature and design. Harvard University Press.
• Crick, N. R., & Dodge, K. A. (1994). A review and reformulation of social information-processing mechanisms in children’s social adjustment. Psychological Bulletin, 115(1), 74–101. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.115.1.74
• Dahlberg, L. L., Toal, S. B., Swahn, M., & Behrens, C. B. (2005). Measuring violence-related attitudes, behaviors, and influences among youths: A compendium of assessment tools (2nd ed., pp. 306–307). Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/YV_Compendium.pdf
• Huesmann, L. R., & Guerra, N. G. (1997). Children’s normative beliefs about aggression and aggressive behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72(2), 408–419. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.72.2.408
• Multisite Violence Prevention Project. (2004). Description of measures: Cohort-wide student survey, 2004. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control.
• Multisite Violence Prevention Project. (2008). The Multisite Violence Prevention Project: Impact of a universal school-based violence prevention program on social-cognitive outcomes. Prevention Science, 9(4), 231–244. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11121-008-0100-2
• Orpinas, P., Murray, N., & Kelder, S. (1999). Parental influences on students’ aggressive behavior and weapon carrying. Health Education & Behavior, 26(6), 774–787. https://doi.org/10.1177/109019819902600604

Items of the Scale