The Adultcentrism Scale in the educational relationship: Instrument development and preliminary validation

The term “adultcentrism” refers to a paradigm of thought that leads adults to provide inadequate or distorted responses to children’s needs (Furioso, 2000), despite the belief of acting in children’s best interest. Our understanding of adult-child relationship could be subjected to such adultcentric bias, thus preventing the acknowledgement of the deeply reciprocal qualities of the encounter between the culture of adults and the one of children. Several authors have focused on the importance of making an effort in recognizing the partiality of such adult-centered perspective (Goode, 1986; Petr, 1992; Furioso, 2000; Mackay, 1973, 2003; Biancardi, 2002; Foti, 2004), but no research tools have been proposed so far. The Adultcentrism Scale, a questionnaire of 27 items, has been developed and administered to 326 university students during a pilot study. Three factors emerged from ML EFA (Oblimin rotation): “Child as an empty box”, “Child without agency”, and “Competent Child”. The factorial structure resulted corroborated by CFA, with the exception of one item that has been therefore excluded. The final version of the Adultcentrism Scale has been administered to a sample of 910 parents of primary school-age children. Results indicate that the Adultcentrism Scale could help in the detection of the construct of adultcentrism in caregivers, particularly in large-scale studies. The three factors extracted and the tendency of response distributions appear consistent with the reference literature. Reflecting on adultcentrism can bring positive implications in designing interventions focusing on the improvement of adult-child relationship quality.