ABSTRACT

The reliability and validity of the Children’s Social Understanding Scale (CSUS) was further assessed by examining fathers’ as well as mothers’ reports of children’s social understanding, along with behavioural measures of children’s mental state understanding. 112 families with children aged 38 to 64 months participated with both parents filling out the CSUS, while children were administered a language test and a battery of Theory of Mind (ToM) tasks. Internal consistency of the CSUS was high for both mothers and fathers, and maternal and paternal CSUS scores were moderately-highly correlated. In addition, mothers’ and fathers’ CSUS responses were each associated with children’s behavioural ToM, even after controlling for age and verbal ability. Finally, both parents appeared to have roughly equally strong insights into their children’s ToM and each parent’s insight did not appear to add novel information about ToM over and above that of the other parent. These findings suggest that the CSUS is a reliable and valid tool in assessment of ToM by both mothers and fathers, and that researchers can safely use either one or the other as a complement to behavioural performance in studying ToM.

摘要

通过检查父亲和母亲关于儿童社会理解的报告以及儿童心理状态理解的行为量，进一步评估了儿童社会理解量表（CSUS）的信度和效度。112个有38至64个月大的孩子的家庭与父母一起参加了CSUS，同时为孩子们进行了语言测试和一系列的心理理论（ToM）任务。父亲和母亲的CSUS的内部一致性都很高，而母亲和父亲的CSUS得分具有中等高度的相关性。此外，即使在控制了年龄和言语能力之后，母亲和父亲的CSUS响应都与孩子的行为ToM相关。最后，父母双方对孩子的ToM的洞察力大致相同，而父母双方的洞察力似乎并没有增加关于ToM的新颖信息。这些发现表明，CSUS是父母双方评估ToM的可靠且有效的工具，并且研究人员可以安全地使用一个或另一个来补充研究ToM的行为表现。