Attitudes towards Multi-Child Families Scale

1. Abstract

The Attitudes towards Multi-Child Families Scale (Babincak & Kacmarova, 2023) is a psychometrically validated, 20-item self-report instrument designed to systematically measure and evaluate societal and individual attitudes toward families with three or more children. Developed in response to an identified gap in family psychology and demographic research—where research historically concentrated on general fertility intentions, pronatalist state policies, or the dynamics of single-child households—this measurement tool captures the multidimensional evaluation of large family units within contemporary societies experiencing demographic shifts toward low fertility rates.

The scale was developed through an initial 35-item conceptual pool derived from international sociological and demographic scholarship on family size and reproductive behaviors (e.g., Abbasi-Shavazi et al., 2003), integrating theoretical domains such as religiosity (Markova & Luksik, 2013), employment and economic standing (Willits & Swales, 2003), material living standards (Michalek, 2004), and intra-familial emotional support mechanisms (Helus, 2004). Following initial pilot testing to verify item clarity and discriminatory index (Opocenska & Babincak, 2020), exploratory factor analytic techniques—guided by the Hull method and parallel analysis—yielded a stable three-factor structure accounting for 41% of the total variance: (1) Good Life in Multi-Child Families, (2) Deficient Standard of Living in Multi-Child Families, and (3) Negative Characteristics of Multi-Child Family Members.

The final instrument utilizes a 5-point Likert-type response format anchored from 1 (totally agree) to 5 (totally disagree). Psychometric evaluation confirms satisfactory to good internal consistency across all latent dimensions, with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients ranging between .730 and .820. The instrument provides developmental psychologists, family sociologists, and public policy researchers with a robust, standardized diagnostic tool to assess social stereotyping, economic stigma, and interpersonal perceptions surrounding multi-child families in modern post-industrial societies.

2. Keywords

Attitudes towards Multi-Child Families Scale, family size attitudes, large families, family planning, social perception, sibling dynamics, economic standard of living, family psychology, psychometrics, pronatalism

3. Authors

The Attitudes towards Multi-Child Families Scale was conceptualized, operationalized, and psychometrically validated by researchers based at the Institute of Psychology at the University of Presov in Prešov, Slovakia:

• Peter Babincak, PhD — Associate Professor, Institute of Psychology, Faculty of Arts, University of Presov, Prešov, Slovak Republic. Primary research interests include social psychology, psychometrics, and family values.
• Monika Kacmarova, PhD — Assistant Professor and Researcher, Institute of Psychology, Faculty of Arts, University of Presov, Prešov, Slovak Republic. Corresponding Author: [email protected]. Academic correspondence address: University of Presov, 17. novembra 1, 080 01 Prešov, Slovakia.

4. Purpose

Over the past half-century, demographic transition in industrialized nations has led to a sustained contraction of average household size. In European nations, total fertility rates have frequently plummeted below the demographic replacement threshold of 2.1 births per woman. Within this cultural and structural climate, the cultural norm has shifted predominantly toward the “two-child ideal” or single-child family models. Consequently, households containing three or more children—frequently operationalized in demographic and sociological literature as “multi-child families”—increasingly occupy a distinctive, often socially scrutinized minority status. Despite substantial research on parental burnout, maternal employment, and fertility decline, empirical literature lacked a standardized, psychometrically grounded instrument dedicated specifically to capturing explicit societal attitudes, prejudices, and socio-cognitive evaluations regarding multi-child families. The Attitudes towards Multi-Child Families Scale was engineered specifically to fill this methodological void.

From an applied research and clinical perspective, individual and social attitudes toward large families directly influence reproductive decision-making, the stigmatization or social integration of children from large households, and public acceptance of redistributive welfare policies. While pronatalist state initiatives often introduce child-tax allowances, parental leaves, and family subsidies, the efficacy of these policies is deeply modulated by prevailing social attitudes. If multi-child families are culturally perceived through stereotypes of financial irresponsibility, parental neglect, or lower intellectual attainment, parents choosing larger families face considerable psychosocial stress, social isolation, and institutional marginalization.

The primary purpose of the instrument is therefore threefold:

• Empirical Assessment: To measure normative evaluations and implicit social stereotypes held by adult populations regarding families with three or more children, distinguishing between positive psychosocial appraisals and economic or behavioral stigmatization.
• Interdisciplinary Sociological and Demographic Investigation: To enable demographic researchers and family sociologists to correlate attitudes toward large families with demographic background variables (e.g., religiosity, socio-economic status, personal sibling status, urban versus rural residence).
• Informing Social and Family Policy: To provide municipal, regional, and national policy analysts with empirical data regarding public sentiment, facilitating the design of interventions aimed at counteracting socioeconomic stigma and supporting healthy family development across diverse family structures.

5. Psychological Construct

The psychological construct underlying the scale is the multidimensional attitude toward multi-child family structures. In classical social psychology, an attitude is conceptualized as a psychological tendency expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor, encompassing affective, cognitive, and behavioral components. In the context of family demography, attitudes toward multi-child families reflect not merely numerical preferences for family size, but deep-seated cognitive representations regarding parental competence, sibling socialization, economic sustainability, and social responsibility. Factor-analytic validation identified three distinct yet interrelated psychological dimensions that constitute this construct:

1. Good Life in Multi-Child Families

This positive evaluative dimension captures beliefs regarding the emotional, developmental, and social benefits fostered within large family environments. It reflects the perception that having multiple siblings serves as a natural protective factor against loneliness, fosters enhanced interpersonal and communication competencies, and generates high levels of reciprocal emotional support and domestic joy. Typical cognitive schemas within this dimension posit that children in large families acquire early prosocial skills, conflict resolution strategies, and empathy through continuous sibling interactions. Items reflecting this dimension include beliefs that multi-child households are intrinsically happier, that children in such settings experience richer social stimulation, and that mutual aid among siblings is intensified.

2. Deficient Standard of Living in Multi-Child Families

This socio-economic dimension measures cognitive evaluations concerning the financial strain, material deprivation, and structural constraints imposed by rearing multiple children. Rather than focusing on parental personality, this factor reflects public perceptions of structural scarcity: the belief that each additional child exponentially strains household finances, suppresses parental consumption, forces material compromises (such as reliance on secondhand goods), and severely constrains maternal personal agency, leisure, and career advancement. This dimension directly taps into contemporary consumerist paradigms that associate optimal child-rearing with high per-child capital investment, where large families are perceived as economically precarious or inefficient.

3. Negative Characteristics of Multi-Child Family Members

The third dimension taps into explicit interpersonal stigma, moral judgment, and negative stereotyping directed at parents and offspring in multi-child households. This construct measures beliefs that parents of large families are impulsive, irresponsible, emotionally overwhelmed, or lacking the requisite mental capacity to provide individualized attention, resulting in perceived emotional neglect and diminished academic or cognitive outcomes for their offspring. This dimension reflects modern “intensive parenting” ideologies, which dictate that high-quality parenting requires exhaustive parental time, psychological vigilance, and educational investment per child. Those who deviate by having many children are stereotyped as intellectually inferior, socio-culturally backward, or neglectful.

6. Theoretical Framework

The conceptual framework of the Attitudes towards Multi-Child Families Scale is rooted in an integration of Social Representation Theory (Moscovici, 1988), the Second Demographic Transition Theory (Lesthaeghe, 2010; Abbasi-Shavazi et al., 2003), and Microeconomic Theories of Fertility (Becker, 1960).

The Second Demographic Transition and Post-Materialist Values

According to the Second Demographic Transition (SDT) framework advanced by Ron Lesthaeghe and Dirk van de Kaa, industrial and post-industrial societies have experienced profound value shifts characterized by secularization, individual autonomy, female economic empowerment, and self-actualization. As societies shift from materialist survival concerns to post-materialist individualism, reproductive behaviors decouple from traditional social norms, leading to sub-replacement fertility rates, the proliferation of non-traditional family constellations, and the postponement of parenthood. Within this milieu, childbearing is reconceptualized: children are no longer viewed as economic assets or domestic labor resources, but as emotional and psychological commitments chosen within a framework of personal fulfillment.

Quality-Quantity Trade-Off Paradigm

Gary Becker’s microeconomic theory of fertility posits an economic trade-off between the quantity of children and their perceived quality (defined in terms of parental investment, private education, health resources, and material standard of living). In post-industrial consumer cultures, the resource dilution hypothesis suggests that parental financial, emotional, and temporal capital is finite; dividing these resources across many children is widely assumed to dilute individual developmental trajectories. Consequently, societal attitudes often frame large family sizes as a violation of optimal developmental norms, generating prejudice that children from large families receive inadequate cognitive scaffolding and emotional care.

Social Representation and Intensive Mothering Ideology

Under Sharon Hays’ framework of the “cultural contradictions of motherhood” and the ideology of intensive mothering, successful child-rearing is socially constructed as child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, and financially expensive. The Attitudes towards Multi-Child Families Scale incorporates these representations across its subscales: the cultural mandate of intensive parenting directly informs the social condemnation of large families, where parents—particularly mothers—are perceived as incapable of sustaining such intensive individual oversight over three or more children, thereby inviting social judgments of irresponsibility or emotional neglect.

7. Validity

During the development and initial validation of the Attitudes towards Multi-Child Families Scale by Babincak and Kacmarova (2023), construct formulation and item development were systematically grounded in established demographic and sociological scholarship:

Content and Face Validity

The initial pool of 35 items was generated through an extensive literature review spanning empirical studies on multi-child dynamics, societal views on parity, and the socio-structural differentiation between one-child and multi-child families (Abbasi-Shavazi et al., 2003; Markova & Luksik, 2013; Willits & Swales, 2003; Michalek, 2004; Helus, 2004). Items were evaluated by expert psychologists to verify that the theoretical domains (material well-being, psychological flourishing, and social prejudice) were appropriately captured. A formal pilot study conducted by Opocenska and Babincak (2020) verified the comprehensibility, semantic clarity, and discrimination indices of the 35 preliminary items among adult community samples, leading to the refinement and subsequent elimination of ambiguous, redundant, or non-discriminating items.

Construct and Factorial Validity

Factorial validity was established via rigorous exploratory factor analytic protocols. The application of non-arbitrary retention criteria—specifically the Hull method and parallel analysis—demonstrated that a three-factor solution provided the most theoretically coherent and mathematically robust representation of the latent space. Items with cross-loadings or inadequate primary loadings (< .40) were iteratively removed (resulting in the deletion of 15 non-functioning items, such as general inquiries regarding holiday spending or broad minority stereotypes), yielding a parsimonious 20-item final inventory. The three latent factors clearly differentiated positive interpersonal beliefs from economic strain and individual-level stigmatization, supporting the multidimensional construct validity of the instrument.

8. Reliability

The internal consistency of the Attitudes towards Multi-Child Families Scale was formally evaluated within the adult validation sample in the Slovak Republic using Cronbach’s coefficient alpha ($lpha$):

• Factor 1: Good Life in Multi-Child Families (6 items): Demonstrated good internal consistency, with $lpha = .820$. The inter-item correlations indicated strong mutual association among items assessing emotional vitality, sociability, and sibling solidarity without exhibiting excessive item redundancy.
• Factor 2: Deficient Standard of Living in Multi-Child Families (6 items): Yielded an acceptable internal consistency coefficient of $lpha = .730$, reflecting coherent shared variance concerning economic limitation, financial strain, and personal maternal sacrifice.
• Factor 3: Negative Characteristics of Multi-Child Family Members (8 items): Achieved a high internal consistency reliability of $lpha = .810$, demonstrating robust homogeneity across statements reflecting cognitive, emotional, and parental deficits attributed to multi-child family units.

Across all three subscales, the reported Cronbach’s alpha values fall comfortably within the standard psychometric threshold of acceptability (.70 to .90) for research instruments (American Psychological Association standards). The absence of extreme alphas exceeding .95 suggests that individual items provide unique variance rather than merely paraphrasing the same prompt.

9. Factor Analysis

To identify and verify the underlying dimensional architecture of the 35 original items, Babincak and Kacmarova (2023) conducted an Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) using advanced factor-retention criteria:

Factor Retention Decisions

Rather than relying solely on Kaiser’s eigenvalue-greater-than-one rule (which frequently leads to over-factoring in psychological assessment), the researchers determined the optimal factor count using two empirically supported methodologies:

• Parallel Analysis (PA): Timmerman and Lorenzo-Seva’s (2011) optimally implemented parallel analysis for continuous/ordinal variables, comparing empirical eigenvalues against random data matrices generated with equivalent sample dimensions.
• The Hull Method: Developed by Lorenzo-Seva, Timmerman, and Kiers (2011), this method evaluates the optimal balance between model complexity (degrees of freedom) and fit, providing superior factor selection compared to traditional scree tests.

Factor Solution and Variance

Both the Hull method and parallel analysis converged on a 3-factor solution. This structural model accounted for 41.0% of the total cumulative variance in the data matrix, a level consistent with established psychometric standards for multidimensional socio-psychological attitude measures. Subsequent factor rotation clarified the simple structure: 20 items loaded cleanly onto their respective target factors with primary factor loadings exceeding .40 and minimal cross-loadings. A total of 15 items failed to meet statistical retention parameters (due to poor communalities, weak item-total discrimination, or conceptual overlap) and were eliminated from the final instrument.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Test Type: Original self-report psychometric rating scale / socio-psychological survey measure.
• Target Population: Adult general population (human subjects, including male and female respondents across young adulthood, thirties, middle age, and older adulthood; 18 to 85+ years).
• Original Language: Slovak.
• Number of Items: 20 items (retained from an initial 35-item experimental pool).
• Dimensional Structure: Three subscales:
  • Factor 1: Good Life in Multi-Child Families (6 items)
  • Factor 2: Deficient Standard of Living in Multi-Child Families (6 items)
  • Factor 3: Negative Characteristics of Multi-Child Family Members (8 items)
• Response Format: 5-point Likert-type scale with the following response anchors:
  • 1 = Totally agree
  • 2 = Agree
  • 3 = Neither agree nor disagree (Neutral)
  • 4 = Disagree
  • 5 = Totally disagree
• Scoring Instructions:
  • In its original published format, lower numerical values (1–2) represent agreement with the stated proposition, whereas higher numerical values (4–5) represent disagreement.
  • Researchers may calculate subscale scores by averaging or summing item scores within each factor. Depending on analytical requirements, researchers frequently reverse-score items (recoding 1 → 5, 2 → 4, 3 → 3, 4 → 2, 5 → 1) so that higher aggregated values reflect higher endorsement of the named construct (e.g., higher score on Factor 1 = more positive attitude toward family life; higher score on Factor 2 = higher perceived economic deficiency; higher score on Factor 3 = higher endorsement of negative stereotypes).

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

• Test Publication Year: 2023.
• Commercial Fee: There is no fee required to access or administer this instrument for academic and non-commercial scientific research purposes.
• Permissions & Licensing: The scale was published in an academic peer-reviewed journal (Journal of Family Studies). Researchers wishing to translate, adapt, or utilize the instrument in formal studies are advised to contact the corresponding author, Dr. Monika Kacmarova ([email protected]), and obtain customary permissions from the publisher where required by institutional guidelines.

12. References

• Abbasi-Shavazi, M. J., McDonald, P., & Hosseini-Chavoshi, M. (2003). The fertility transition in Iran: Revolution and reproduction. Springer. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-94-017-0291-1
• Babincak, P., & Kacmarova, M. (2023). Attitudes towards multi-child families in the Slovak Republic. Journal of Family Studies, 29(4), 1362–1376. https://doi.org/10.1080/13229400.2022.2060108
• Becker, G. S. (1960). An economic analysis of fertility. In Demographic and economic change in developed countries (pp. 209–240). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1840396
• Helus, Z. (2004). Psychologie pro střední školy [Psychology for secondary schools]. Fortuna.
• Lesthaeghe, R. (2010). The unfolding story of the second demographic transition. Population and Development Review, 36(2), 211–251. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1728-4457.2010.00328.x
• Lorenzo-Seva, U., Timmerman, M. E., & Kiers, H. A. L. (2011). The Hull method for selecting the number of common factors. Multivariate Behavioral Research, 46(2), 340–360. https://doi.org/10.1080/00273171.2011.564527
• Markova, I., & Luksik, I. (2013). Changing family forms and values in Central Europe. In S. M. Bianchi (Ed.), Families as they really are. Columbia University Press.
• Michalek, J. (2004). Sociologie rodiny [Sociology of the family]. Grada.
• Moscovici, S. (1988). Notes towards a description of social representations. European Journal of Social Psychology, 18(3), 211–250. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.2420180303
• Opocenska, A., & Babincak, P. (2020). Attitudes towards multi-child families in the Slovak Republic: A pilot study [Unpublished manuscript]. Institute of Psychology, University of Presov.
• Timmerman, M. E., & Lorenzo-Seva, U. (2011). Dimensionality assessment of ordered polytomous items with parallel analysis. Psychological Methods, 16(2), 209–220. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0023353
• Willits, F. K., & Swales, D. (2003). Economic well-being and family size: An analysis of family formation among Pennsylvania families. Journal of Family Issues, 24(5), 606–628. https://doi.org/10.1177/0192513X03254516

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)