Revision, reliability and validity testing, and development of normative data of Inventory of Alienation Toward Parents in military personnel

To revise the Inventory of Alienation Toward Parents (IAP) and test its reliability and validity in a military population in order to provide a scientific tool for assessing the level and grade of parent-child alienation among military personnel.

Whole-cluster stratified random sampling was used to subject 8641 service members from 8 Army units. Then all participants were surveyed with 18-item adolescent IAP, Beck Depression Inventory-Ⅱ, and Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7. SPSS 27.0 and AMOS 26.0 were used to perform item analysis, exploratory factor analysis (EFA), and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to assess reliability and validity. Subsequently, our revised 16-item version of IAP was employed to develop means, percentiles, cut-off scores, and category norms.

① Items 3 and 12 were deleted in item analysis. ② EFA extracted the original communication and emotional distance factors; CFA indicated that the two-factor model had good fitness, with the mother-child alienation scale: χ²/df=4.248, comparative fit index (CFI)=0.962, Tucker-Lewis index (TLI)= 0.929, root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA)= 0.028, standardized root mean squared residual (SRMR)=0.023; while the father-child alienation scale: χ²/df=5.41, CFI=0.939, TLI=0.901, RMSEA=0.032, SRMR=0.044. ③ The internal consistency reliability of the total IAP was good (0.744~0.888). ④The total IAP score and scores of the mother-child and father-child subscales were positively correlated with depression and anxiety (r=0.395~0.493, P < 0.01). ⑤ The average total IAP score for military personnel was 17.27±4.21, and the scores of mother-child alienation and father-child alienation were 8.64±2.26 and 8.62±2.43, respectively. With percentiles of P₇₅ and P₉₀ as the cut-off points, the total IAP score can be stratified into 3 levels, that is, normal (≤16), moderate (17~19), and severe (≥20). Then, additional category norms were developed based on demographic characteristics.

Our revised 16-item military version of IAP shows good reliability and validity. A preliminary and representative norm is developed primarily, and can be used to assess the level and grade of military parental alienation.