Assessment of the familial relationships of young adult children of separated parents

The aim of the present work was the psychometric study of six scales designed to assess the familial relationships of young adult children of separated parents. The analized constructs are: interparental conflict, loyalty conflict, coalition, parentification, children’s perceptions of the parent-child relationships, and young adult perception of the separation-individuation process. Internal consistency and factorial validity was studied through a sample of 535 Spanish young adults from disrupted and non disrupted families who were between 20 and 30 years old. The confirmatory factor analyses showed a certain acceptability of the original structures of all scales, with BNNFI, BNFI, and CFI indices above 0.90 in all cases, and RMSEA below 0.05 in the multifactorial scales and slightly higher in the unifactorial ones. The internal consistency values were between 0.89 and 0.94 in the unifactorial scales, and between 0.70 and 0.92 in the multifactorial ones. The estimations found for the factor saturation supported the acceptability of the original structures. It is concluded that all the scales within this set present acceptable properties, in terms of dimensionality and internal consistency. The limitations are pointed out.