Understanding Asian parenting from a Rasch perspective

This study examines the factor structure of Asian child‐reported parenting from a Rasch perspective. Participants comprised 291 sixth graders (11 to 13 years) in Singapore. Six different aspects of parenting were measured, namely warmth, rejection, structure, chaos, autonomy support, and coercion. Rasch Analysis was used to transform ordinal data into linear measures; category functioning was examined; residual‐based principal components were analysed; differential item functioning was assessed; and items and subjects that were misfitting were removed. Results showed that parenting comprised six dimensions, namely warmth, autonomy support, structure‐control, structure‐warmth, chaos, and negative parenting. The findings suggest that it is important for Asian parents to provide guidance to their children (in structure‐control and structure‐warmth) and reaffirms the relevance of warmth in Asian parenting.