Parent Child Communication

The instruments: content of talking about sex

Nine quantitative research papers focused on the contents of parent-child communication about sex. Six papers focused on parent-child pairs. A number of researchers used a range of different topics to assess whether or not parents had ever discussed the topic with their children. For example, ten items of content and ten items of process of communication between mother and adolescents were established by Miller et al. (1998a), with the aim to measure which sex-related topics were discussed and how their content was transmitted. The same research team used the instruments with various groups of participants. For examples, Dutra et al. (1999) used the content and process instruments to measure not only mothers and teenagers but also fathers’ communication, and Whitaker et al. (1999) used these instruments to measure the influences of parent-child communication about sex in content and process with sexual risk behaviours in sexually active young people.

Dilorio et al. (1999) established the interview schedule, included 14 sex-related topics to ask mothers and teenagers, aged 13-15 years, about whether they had discussed each topictogether. The instrument was established based on existing literature and focus group discussions. Kapungu et al. (2010) used the instrument, established by Dilorio et al. (1999) with mothers and adolescents to examine gender differences in the content of adolescent communication about sexual issues, but included 17 topics. It was suitable for the researchers to apply the instrument because both studies focused on Africa-American groups. The findings might help in extending the existing knowledge of content of African-American families’ communication about ...

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...ut fathers. However, the researchers did not clarify about how to improve the instrument.

The quantitative instruments measured the frequency, comfort, content, process, and timing of parent-child communication about sex using mainly self-report measures. Therefore, it appears that the researchers developed the measurements of parent-child communication about sex in various ways. In the simplest form, researchers examined the frequency of communication. In addition, a number of studies considered multiple perspectives within the same topics and focused on broad ranking issues of communication. Interestingly, some researchers have tried to move away from the self report methods and use more innovative methodology such as videotaped conversations (Lefkowitz et al., 2000), however these too have disadvantages if the conversations are based in a lab setting.