Journal of Child and Family Studies https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-018-1294-y ORIGINAL PAPER The Development and Validation of the Parental Involvement Survey in their Children’s Elementary Studies (PISCES) P. Cristian Gugiu 1 ● Mihaiela Ristei Gugiu 2 ● Michael Barnes 1 ● Belinda Gimbert 1 ● Megan Sanders 3 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2018 Abstract The purpose of the present study was to (1) examine the internal validity of the Parental Involvement Survey in their Children’s Elementary Studies (PISCES) and (2) illustrate how survey instruments can be validated using modern psychometric techniques. The PISCES was developed by the present authors by adopting items from the Hoover-Dempsey and Sandler Revised Model of Parent Involvement and the Parent Reading Belief Inventory. The PISCES is comprised of 49 new items and 35 modified items that measure parental beliefs about education, reading with children, self-efficacy, and involvement in school activities. Data were collected from 230 parents of kindergarten students enrolled in a major Midwest school district. We utilized modern psychometric techniques to validate the instrument, including ordinal parallel analysis, ordinal exploratory factor analysis (EFA), Rasch modeling, second-order EFA, and reliability analysis. Our findings revealed the PISCES attained a very high level of internal validity although some of its subscales could benefit from the addition of more items. Tables for converting the sum of individual item scores to Rasch scores are provided. We advise readers to use the whole instrument if they want a holistic measure of parental involvement and the individual scales if they are only interested in a particular domain of parental involvement. We also advise readers to adopt our conversion tables to facilitate comparisons across studies. Finally, we recommend that survey researchers utilize ordinal parallel analysis and ordinal EFA to investigate the dimensionality of survey instruments and Rasch modeling to further explore and refine them. Keywords Parental involvement ● Survey validation ● Ordinal scales ● Parallel analysis ● Factor analysis ● Rasch modeling ● Reliability analysis A significant body of literature has accrued in the past 50 years regarding the importance of parental involvement in education with hundreds of new studies published each year. A simple search in the ERIC database for the key- words “parental involvement in education” for the 2000 to 2017 period resulted in 2080 publications (an average of 122 new studies per year). Not surprisingly, several survey instruments have been developed for measuring the amount of involvement parents have in their children’s education. Yet, few studies have focused on validating these instru- ments and, with few exceptions (Chen and Zhu 2017; Manz et al. 2014), they ignored the ordinal nature of the data. Within psychometrics, it is well-known that ordinal data downwardly bias estimates of reliability and association (e.g., correlations, factor loadings, structural coefficients) (Gadermann et al. 2012; Gugiu et al. 2010; Gugiu et al. 2009; Zumbo et al. 2007) and produce composite scores that do not possess an interval level of measurement (McDonald 1999; Stevens 1946). This gap in the parental involvement literature is of great concern because if the “rulers” used to measure the construct fail to uphold basic measurement standards, the likelihood that findings will replicate across studies will be severely impaired. It is generally accepted that parents are their children’s first teachers (Reese et al. 2010). As children enter schooling, their parents’ beliefs about school play a sig- nificant role in children’s academic success, learning * P. Cristian Gugiu crisgugiu@gmail.com 1 The Ohio State University, 210B Ramseyer Hall, 29W. Woodruff Ave, Columbus, OH 43210, USA 2 National Registry of Emergency Medical Technicians, Columbus, OH, USA 3 Colorado School of Mines, Golden, CO, USA Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-018-1294-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. 1234567890();,: 1234567890();,: