Measuring parents’ developmental goals for their children: Updating Kağitçibaşi’s approach to autonomy-relatedness in the United States and China

Abstract

Although many scholars continue to describe cultural differences in terms of the individualism–collectivism distinction, unidimensional measures seem unlikely to capture the richness of cultural variation in parents’ socialization goals for their children. Kağıtçıbaşı’s (2009) theoretical model consists of a bidimensional approach with agency (autonomous to heteronomous) considered orthogonal to interpersonal distance (related to separate), yielding four quadrants. Kağıtçıbaşı argued that countries like the United States fit into the autonomous-separate quadrant, traditional “majority-world” cultures into the heteronomous-related quadrant, and educated urbanized cultural groups in majority-world societies into the autonomous-related quadrant. Given conceptual problems with the scales Kağıtçıbaşı used to measure these constructs, we developed, piloted, and validated the Related–Autonomous–Separate–Heteronomous (RASH) Scale and examined its psychometric properties and measurement invariance in a sample of Chinese (N = 464) and North American (N = 635) parents. Our results suggest that the four types of parental developmental goals (relatedness, separation, autonomy, and heteronomy) are not as neatly related as Kağıtçıbaşı’s model assumes; specifically, the Chinese and North American parents in our study highly valued both autonomous and related developmental goals. Our validation of the RASH scale is an important first step to develop a more appropriate measure of parental socialization goals for cross-cultural investigation.