Development and Validation of the Parental Smartphone Use Management Scale (PSUMS): Parents’ Perceived Self-Efficacy with Adolescents with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

The psychometric properties of the Parental Smartphone Use Management Scale (PSUMS) and its prospective relationships with symptoms of smartphone addiction and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) were studies in a sample of parents of adolescents with ADHD. This is a scale to measure parents’ perceived self-efficacy on managing their children’s smartphone use. Construct validity (exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis), criterion-related validity (known-group validity and concurrent validity), and reliability (Cronbach’s alpha) were performed for data analyses. The results showed that the PSUMS had good factorials validity and high reliabilities, with Cronbach’s alphas ranging between 0.93 and 0.95. The 17-item PSUMS accounted for 78.58% of the total variance and contains three theoretically and statistically appropriate subscales: reactive management, proactive management, and monitoring. Strong relationships were found between parental smartphone use management and symptoms of smartphone addiction and ADHD in expected directions. Moreover, parents of children with smartphone addiction yielded lower scores on all three PSUMS subscales than parents of children without smartphone addiction. The PSUMS is considered a valuable and reliable tool in the study of parental management on their adolescent children’s smartphone use, while providing us with important targets for intervention.