CARE: A short instrument for assessment of post divorce co-parenting

Abstract

This paper presents an instrument for assessment of the perception that divorced parents have about the support they receive from their ex partners in the care for their children. The CARE (Cuestionario de Ayuda Recibida de la Ex pareja) is an 8-item questionnaire created in Spanish. Data were collected in four different samples of divorced and separated persons and their children from different autonomous Spanish communities. Participants were 223 parents and 160 children from divorced families. Factorial analysis came up with a single factor accounting for 41.76 percent of the total variance. The CARE has appropriate psychometric properties: high internal consistency according to Cronbach´s alpha and convergent and discriminant construct validity, supported by its relations with measures of adaptation to divorce (CAD-S) in the case of the parents, and with behavioral problems (CBCL) in the case of the children.